by JULIET WATERS

Which Brings Me to You is a romantic comedy written by two authors, a man and a woman. The central characters meet at a wedding, almost have sex, then decide instead to correspond, the old fashioned way, through letters for six months before they meet. As any publisher will tell you, lad lit doesn’t sell, and any woman novelist will tell you, chick lit is low status. So: idea! Sandwich the two together. I rolled my eyes and was about to throw the book back into the slush pile, when I noticed one of the two authors, Steve Almond. It rung a bell, but not for his short story collection: My Life in Heavy Metal or his non-fiction book, Candyfreak.

Recently Almond wrote a funny, poignant essay for Salon.com about being attacked repeatedly on someone’s literary blog, then finally meeting up with the blogger at a dismal literary festival in L.A. That essay came back to me at the Blue Metropolis festival a few weeks ago, because of Almond’s insights about how thin-skinned and haunted by failure writers are. I even went back and re-read it, revisiting a favourite paragraph.

“Some bloggers... happen to be terrific writers. They use their blogs to undertake the honest labour of self-reflection... But there are also bloggers who... are simply too lazy and insecure to risk making art, to release their deepest emotions onto a blank page with no promise of recognition. So they launch a blog instead. I can understand the temptation. It’s one I feel every day. [The blogger] horrifies me precisely because he represents certain desires that live inside of me: the desire to avoid the solitude and humiliation of sustained creative work, to choose grievance over mercy, to find a shortcut to fame.”

This lofty accusation hinted Almond might have a bit more depth and dedication than this gimmicky first novel suggested. So I gave it a shot. And after a couple of promising chapters, I kept reading. Almond has talent, no doubt about that. And so does Julianna Baggott, the other author on this project.

Such is their talent that I kept reading, even when the middle chapters started to read an awful lot like the first chapters. And I kept reading even after I started to feel like I was in the back seat of a car driven by two very nice, entertaining people who have no idea where the hell they’re going and have been driving me around in circles for the last 10 hours. And finally I kept reading because of that sick helpless feeling you have when you know there’s going to be a car crash.

No amount of talent is going to make up for the huge massive, gapping flaw of this project: the premise that two people with enough relationship experience to fill three hundred pages of “confessions” don’t have enough relationship wisdom to know when they’ve been yammering on a little bit too long about their relationship history. In fact, that’s all this novel is, two reasonably intelligent characters making themselves insufferable by sticking relentlessly to the same depressing subject, then trying to self-correct with layers of glibness.

This, they believe, will build a more “honest” foundation for the relationship. Of course it can’t, because honesty isn’t determined just by what you say or write about yourself. It’s also about action and about risk. And there’s very little of either of these in this relationship, or this project. That is of course the allure of the long-distance relationship, the freakishly huge twin of the one-night stand. Sometimes it works, but more often than not it turns out to be a way of avoiding a real relationship and a waste of months of your life. I suspect there’s a similar thing happening in a long-distance collaborative novel. I’m sure the intentions were pure, but in the end it reads as Almond puts it so well himself, like two people giving into the temptation of avoiding “the solitude and humiliation of sustained creative work.”

Which Brings Me To You by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott, Algonquin/Chapel Hill, hc, 320pp, $25.99