How NOT to be . . . anything, reallyWhen Georgia's husband leaves her for another woman, she turns to her friend Julie for support. "I JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN!" she screams into the phone. "YOU HAVE TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY! YOU HAVE TO TAKE ME OUT AND REMIND ME THAT I'M YOUNG AND ALIVE AND CAN HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF FUN!" Slightly concerned for her friend's sanity, Julie manages to enlist three of her other single friends to join her and Georgia for a girls' night out. Alice, her biological clock ticking as she nears forty, has quit her job as a public defender to devote herself full-time to finding a mate. Sensitive Ruby yearns for love, but the emotional roller coaster of dating is sometimes more than she can handle; she's been in a barely functional funk since her cat died three months ago. Serena, a crunchy student of Hindu spirituality, has spent so many years "working on herself" that she's long since lost sight of whatever she thought she was working toward in the first place. Although all close friends of Julie's, the other four women barely know each other, but they're united in their determination to make the most of the evening ahead. The outing ends in disaster, but a chance encounter with two French women in the hospital where one of her friends is having her stomach pumped and two are getting bandaged up leaves Julie inspired. She quits her job as a book publicist and sets out to research a self-help book of her own: a lifestyle guide for single women, based on the insights and experiences of women all over the world. Julie travels to France, Rome, Rio, Australia, Bali. . . . By the time she comes home, Julie has interviewed dozens of single men and women on five continents, but it is perhaps her own adventures along the way that have taught her the most. In the meantime, back in New York, her friends carry on with their own lives: Georgia struggles to rediscover herself amidst the messy fallout of divorce, Alice wonders if maybe it's time to settle for the next decent guy that comes along, Serena takes a vow of celibacy and suddenly can't stop thinking about sex for the first time in years, and Ruby's desire for a child leads her to explore nontraditional avenues to motherhood.I won't deny that there were some parts of Liz Tuccillo's "How to Be Single" that I enjoyed very much. Tuccillo's writing, aside from occasional awkward paragraphing choices in dialogue, is smoothly readable, and although much of her humor is uncomfortably overwrought or hackneyed, there are plenty of genuinely witty turns of phrase within these pages, as well as some satirical jabs that hit their target spot-on. There are a few excellent comedic scenes that I can't help hoping have been retained in the film adaptation, even though from what I've heard the movie retains almost nothing of the novel except the title and the theme of friendships among single women in New York. Even though I couldn't stand any of the characters individually, I couldn't help enjoying the gradual process by which Alice, Georgia, Ruby, and Serena get to know each other better while Julie is traveling the world and eventually all become friends in their own right. The final chapter, in which Julie and the other four come together once again to affirm their "girl posse" bond, is so genuinely moving that I found myself almost sorry in the end to have to say goodbye to a cast of characters I've spent the past three days yearning to punch in the face. Almost.But oh, the characters. Have I mentioned how much I loathed, detested, despised, and abhorred almost every last one of them, major and minor alike? Julie and her friends aren't narcissists or sociopaths or sex addicts - I actually would have liked them better if they were, but no, they're just shallow, promiscuous, and selfish in a way I didn't think was possible in an adult human being without an impaired theory of mind. Serena's spirituality is a joke; I'm not Hindu and don't have any personal or emotional connection to Hinduism, but I figure a system of beliefs that has been around for thousands of years and produced the Vedas, Sanskrit epic poetry, and Mahatma Gandhi deserves a bit more respect than Tuccillo seems able to muster (although I won't deny that I found Serena's adventures in Sannyasa [ascetic renunciation] one of the most enjoyable parts of the novel). Georgia's post-divorce acting-out was so unrelentingly and unrepentantly obnoxious and neurotic that I actually thought her children would be better off with the father who had abandoned their mother after twelve years of marriage to take up with a Brazilian samba teacher. I wanted Alice to end things with Jim, not because I didn't want her to settle, but because I kind of liked Jim and I thought *he* deserved better. For a while I actually suspected Ruby of having a soul, since she volunteered at an overcrowded animal shelter and made a special practice of bestowing some attention on animals that were about to be euthanized, making sure "that the last face they saw . . . was a face of love." Then she actually started comparing the plight of a healthy, upper-middle-class single woman in New York to that of an unwanted shelter animal in a cage, and her friends urged her to quit volunteering so she wouldn't have such morbid thoughts, and Ruby did so without a second thought, and from that moment on she was the one I wanted to punch most of all . . . except perhaps for Julie, who, as the protagonist and narrator, had at least as many pages devoted to her as the rest of the women combined, and therefore had the greatest opportunity to reveal in the most intimate detail exactly what an abominable human being she was. This is a woman who sets off on impulse to take the kind of trip around the world that some of us barely dare to dream of, and she spends nearly all of it going to nightclubs and parties in swank hotels. (Yes, I understand that she's researching a book and she needs to visit the places in each country where local singles go to mingle, but she has no problem taking an afternoon for herself now and then, and yet she doesn't bother to check out the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel?) In Paris she meets a cocky, suave entrepreneur named Thomas, with whom she experiences an immediate mutual attraction. He's in an open marriage, but Julie still feels she can't in good conscience go to bed with him, and I was so glad when the Paris chapter finally ended so I wouldn't have to read about him anymore - but somehow this wealthy man who moves in elite circles around the world has never met anyone as fascinating as Julie, and so he follows her to Rome and continues to appear, off and on, throughout the remainder of the book (unlike Julie's moral scruples, by the way), and she falls in love with him but of course they can't be together and it's all angsty and I could really care less. Really, yes, there's something I'm capable of caring less about than Julie and Thomas's epic international affair, and that's Julie's cellulite. Yup, she spouts statistics right and left about the dismal ratio of single men to single women in Sydney, and yet apparently she's never bothered to look up the medical statistics about how cellulite is a thing that happens to about ninety percent of female bodies. (Then again, in Tuccillo's world maybe it doesn't. Apparently *every single woman* in Rio de Janeiro keeps cellulite at bay by a combination of diet, exercise, and liposuction. Why Julie, who can afford to pay for an impulsive little extended jaunt around the globe, isn't just as capable of this regimen as any female in Brazil, is never explored.) She's so certain her body is grotesque that she wears shorts over her swimsuit at the beach (although somehow she doesn't hesitate to get *completely* naked in front of a man she's just met). Towards the end of her research trip, Julie travels to India, and I started exercising my eye muscles in anticipation of the involuntary, violent eyeroll that would inevitably follow upon Julie's oh-so-cliché awakening in the poverty-stricken streets of Mumbai, when she learned to be grateful for everything she had and realized how inconsequential her own petty problems were. Spoiler alert: this doesn't actually happen. Instead, Julie hands some money to a beggar out the window of a taxi, spends an evening feeding hungry children, basks briefly in her own goodness, and then breaks down in tears because OMG NOOOOOOO she thinks she has cellulite in a new place. She's just self-aware enough to recognize that her attitude kinda sucks, and *heaven and earth* I don't think there are enough words in the thickest thesaurus to convey just how odious this woman is.Liz Tuccillo researched her novel in much the same way Julie conducted her research: she traveled to the same places Julie visits and talked to single people of both sexes. Even without sympathetic characters, this could have been a fascinating study of social customs around the world. Unfortunately, Tuccillo is content to reduce the women (and often the men as well) of each country to a broad stereotype: French women have "pride," Italian women slap men a lot, Brazilian men sleep with prostitutes, Chinese of both genders prefer Westerners. Within each culture, there's almost no variation between individuals - the closest thing we see to a difference of opinion is one Brazilian woman who, unlike her friends, admits she would prefer her fiancé to be faithful to her, although she doesn't seem particularly confident, or even especially hopeful, that he will be. There are moments of genuine interest - discussions of how much life has changed in China within a couple of decades, Indian women giving up on dating and letting their families arrange matches for them - but they are few and far between. Basically, beneath the superficial cultural differences, Julie is interviewing the exact same woman over and over again, and I don't mean in a warm fuzzy "people are people, wherever you go" sort of way. I mean these women all have the same interests, ambitions, morals (if not scruples), and even libido. It never even crosses Julie's mind to try to talk to single women outside a major city, or even urban singles not into the nightclub/swank party scene, but even within that narrow subset of women, there should be more individual variety. Where are the women who like to go dancing and enjoy male company, but aren't interested in long-term relationships? Where are the women who have been hurt so badly they've sworn off the dating game, but still like to party with friends? Why, whenever Julie strikes up a conversation with a random passerby, regardless of the circumstances, does the person always (with one exception) happen to be single? I didn't expect, or actually even want, Julie to come across a woman whose single life resembled my own (I went on my first real date when I was twenty-eight years old, with the guy I lost my virginity to four months later on our wedding night), but surely even among the sexy, social, sophisticated crowd, there are more than a few women, and even some men, who prefer for one reason or another to reserve sex for exclusive, at least somewhat serious, relationships? Apparently not.And I don't call myself a feminist, but I couldn't help thinking "How to Be Single" has set back the cause at least fifty years or so. Julie knows she's internalized a lot of negative messages about what it means to be a woman, and especially about the female body, but she doesn't even try to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. And she and her friends pay lip service to the idea of not needing a man in their lives to be complete as human beings, but they don't believe it for a second. I've known a few women who couldn't seem to exist longer than a few days without a man, but they were obviously damaged people who were the exception, not the rule. Julie and her friends are supposed to be accomplished professionals, but literally every action, thought, and conversation in their lives seems to revolve around either finding a man, keeping a man, proving something to a man, or compensating for the lack of a man. The Bechdel test isn't usually applied to literature, but if it were, this 350-page book with a female narrator/protagonist and four female co-deuteragonists would pass on the narrowest of technicalities (there's about half a page where Ruby talks to an animal shelter volunteer about a dog, and another half a page where Julie talks to an Indian contact about the poverty on the streets of Mumbai, and heck, maybe even another half-page or two I forgot). If these characters were real people, I'm not sure their *lives* would pass the Bechdel test. Even the celebration of female friendship in the end exists mostly in the shadow of the men who aren't there.If you read "How to Be Single," you'll probably have a good time more than not. But there are better books out there by far - books that don't reduce women to their sexual desires and biological clocks, books that actually have something new and interesting to say about life, books that have characters with enough redeeming features and complexity and growth that - even when they make bad choices or wallow in self-pity or fret about silly things or act selfishly - you won't want to punch them in the face, at least not the ones you're actually supposed to like. Is that so much to ask? Read one of those books instead.1
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