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A review by ridgewaygirl
Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky
4.0
Rachel is taking care of her writing prof's poodle in exchange for a good grade. She also slept with him, but because she wanted to, not for an A. She takes the dog home for the summer, where her mother is still adjusting to life without her husband, who has left her to live in Tribeca with an airline pilot. Zahid, the writing professor, had a successful debut novel but he's spent the advance for his second novel long ago and now needs to find a new teaching position, so he sub-lets his apartment to the sister of his best friend, a woman who works in the male-dominated world of finance.
This is a short novel with many characters, all of whom get to be the centers of their own chapters. And the novel has a broad reach, from dissatisfaction in an affluent commuter town, to the misogynistic reaches of New York finance, to the inner workings of publishing and academia. So it shouldn't work. The characters should be one-dimensional. And yet, Marcy Dermansky manages to pull it all off. There are a ton of characters, all of them behaving in the most outrageous of ways, yet they all feel very human. Zahid may be sleeping with the mother of the student he once slept with, and to be angling very hard to become her kept man, but somehow I couldn't not be pleased when his writing was going well. Dermansky has a talent for connecting her characters to the reader very quickly, regardless of what kind of self-destructive behavior they are engaged in or how selfish they are and here that talent is able to take a large collection of characters, all behaving badly, in a wide variety of situations, and make a cohesive novel out of it. I do prefer it the intense experience she creates when keeping her writing tightly focused on a single character ([b:The Red Car|34082140|The Red Car|Marcy Dermansky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500664369i/34082140._SX50_.jpg|48998613] is a fantastic book) but with this book, Dermansky set her difficulty rating much higher and landed every jump.
This is a short novel with many characters, all of whom get to be the centers of their own chapters. And the novel has a broad reach, from dissatisfaction in an affluent commuter town, to the misogynistic reaches of New York finance, to the inner workings of publishing and academia. So it shouldn't work. The characters should be one-dimensional. And yet, Marcy Dermansky manages to pull it all off. There are a ton of characters, all of them behaving in the most outrageous of ways, yet they all feel very human. Zahid may be sleeping with the mother of the student he once slept with, and to be angling very hard to become her kept man, but somehow I couldn't not be pleased when his writing was going well. Dermansky has a talent for connecting her characters to the reader very quickly, regardless of what kind of self-destructive behavior they are engaged in or how selfish they are and here that talent is able to take a large collection of characters, all behaving badly, in a wide variety of situations, and make a cohesive novel out of it. I do prefer it the intense experience she creates when keeping her writing tightly focused on a single character ([b:The Red Car|34082140|The Red Car|Marcy Dermansky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500664369i/34082140._SX50_.jpg|48998613] is a fantastic book) but with this book, Dermansky set her difficulty rating much higher and landed every jump.