by JULIET WATERS

Yesterday I looked out my back window to see my neighbour and a couple of uniformed city building inspectors. Instinctively, I went outside to find out what was up. She explained with the kind of painful laughter that sometimes emerges in the face of catastrophe, "My building's falling down." Sure enough, the wall on the storefront just beneath her apartment had buckled, so she'd called 911. I'd noticed earlier that the alley we share had a lot of bricks scattered around, but a curtain shrouds my view of the actual wall. I'd also noticed a new male tenant in her building unlocking his bike and cycling right by the wall as though there were nothing wrong. But worse were the five men who owned the male coiffure salon that the actual wall was part of. They'd been noticing problems for about a week, but just hadn't gotten around to acting on them.

The inspectors had to be talked into letting my neighbour back into her apartment to get her laptop, and firemen soon arrived to rope off the area and evacuate the building. I invited her in for a coffee and we had the kind of conversation that two women inevitably have in these circumstances. First: Why are fireman so insanely cute? And second: What the fuck is wrong with men today (who are not firemen). We don't expect them to save our lives, but is it too much to ask that they notice danger?

So women really do have the kinds of conversations that occur in the first chapters of Adrienne Brodeur's Man Camp, conversations about whether city boys have lost touch with their instincts, and whether it's the fault of decades of feminism. It's a state of affairs that must be incredibly confusing for guys who have come to believe over the last few years that women are actually sitting around fantasizing that a gang of gay men will arrive to teach potential boyfriends how to decorate.

It was in the spirit of this event that I approached Brodeur's debut novel Man Camp. As a founding editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, the literary webzine mentored by Francis Ford Coppola, Brodeur had enough credentials to hint this might be more than just the usual mindless chicklit. The first chapters promised a witty, elegant romantic comedy with enough social commentary slid in to make this a solid late summer read.

The protagonist, beautiful, brainiac biologist, Lucy Stone, is a specialist in mating practices of the animal kingdom. The antagonist is well... you think it might be her chronically late, self-involved, annoying, failed-actress friend, Martha McKenna. But it turns out she's also a protagonist, another woman in the city perpetually disappointed by men. So maybe it's Lucy's ineffectual, self-absorbed boyfriend, Adam, who can't drive, build a fire or last through a Valentine's Day camping trip without whining to go home. We know at least it's not Cooper, Lucy's best friend from college, a virile, friendly, intelligent West Virginia farmer whose visit to NYC sparks the idea of bringing a bunch of city guys to "man camp," i.e. a few weeks on Cooper's farm.

It's an interesting scenario, but this novel ends up revealing more about what's wrong with writers today than men. Man Camp reads like a classic in the first chapters, and then like a classic case of a writer delivering a shoddy product long after the advance has been spent. There are a number of problems with this book, but mainly it's structural. There's no real enemy other than "men," or whatever it is that's wrong with men, and in the end that kind of silly cerebral problem is fine for a chatty conversation, but not enough to sustain a novel. Brodeur seems to realize this a little late in the game, introducing Cooper's manipulative southern belle mother. But by then, like the building next door to me, it's too late and the novel has already started to fall apart.

Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur,
Random House, hc, 211pp, $29.95