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For the
birds
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Love Is a Four Letter Word is a girl’s lager saga
by JULIET WATERS
 Not only is
there actually a category on Amazon.co.uk called “Chick Lit,”
with about 500 titles, but there’s also an emerging sub-category
with about 50 titles called “City Girls Lager Sagas.” That’s
where you’ll find The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing
and Claire Calman’s Love Is a Four Letter Word. What’s the
difference? Chick Lit requires chronically witty dialogue and one or
two scenes involving embarrassing underwear. Lager Sagas, on the other
hand, are the kinds of books that have you wiping away the tears of
laughter before you start crying into your beer.
It’s a potent formula. After working most of her life for women’s
magazines, British author Claire Calman obviously knows what young middle-class
women want to read and want to buy. It’s no surprise that Love
Is a Four Letter Word, her first novel, was a bestseller in England.
It’s got all the Chick Lit requirements, including a scene in which
the hero is revealed to have a tragic flaw—in this case, bad hair.
But there are added hooks, like a series of dark revelations that give
some depth to the neurotic banter.
The title itself is a weary joke. But the bitter, depressive humour
that Calman’s heroine, Bella Kreuzer, indulges in, becomes more
understandable as the novel progresses. You see, Bella isn’t just
some self-absorbed thirtysomething career gal. She actually has some
real emotional baggage to deal with. This is good because it helps you
to forgive her for an otherwise perfect life. She’s attractive,
funny, likeable and successful enough that she can afford to buy herself
a house as a way of getting over the loss of a boyfriend.
On the verge of a workaholic meltdown, Bella’s doctor advises her
to “sod off to the Caribbean for a month. Drink Mai-Tais till dawn
and shag some waiters.” Instead, while visiting friends in a “Kentish
city,” she decides to leave London permanently, buy a house with
a garden and take a job as an art director at a somewhat pathetic local
ad agency. Apart from some loneliness, and some unwillingness to begin
the hard work of being a homeowner, Bella’s worst problem seems
to be her boss, who often “acted as though the sky would fall in
if the lettering on a packet of panty-liners didn’t convey dryness,
freshness, a carefree attitude, a healthy sex life, and a busy, affluent
lifestyle. And that was just the lettering. Who needed panty-liners
anyway? That’s what knickers were for. Soon they’d be marketing
liners to keep your panty-liners fresh and dry.”
This being her only problem, one starts to wonder why exactly Bella
is slouching around, celibate and irritable. It’s been a year since
her relationship ended, yet she’s still so haunted by memories
of Patrick’s loutish behaviour that if feels like last week. Just
at the point where you’re hoping someone will tell her to get the
lead out of her panty-liners, we discover she’s got motivation
to mope. Patrick isn’t just a jerk ex-boyfriend, he’s a dead
jerk ex-boyfriend.
The melancholy takes an interesting turn. Now, when her friends and
parents incessantly inquire as to whether or not she’s getting
out and meeting new people, there’s a method to their nosiness.
When she falls in love with the gardener, Will, aka Springy Hair, he
can’t understand her emotional distance. This lends the novel a
tragi-comic role reversal, and is one of Calman’s more subtle touches.
But there’s too much tiresome romantic formula. Through Springy
Hair’s encouragement, Claire decides to pursue her dreams of being
an artist and within months is almost able to make a living at it. A
facile Psychology 101 subplot involving her mother doesn’t help
much. Sadly, a few unique plot twists don’t make a unique novel.
That can only come from a unique character and this one’s really
been done to death. :
Love Is a
Four Letter Word by Claire Calman. Harper Collins, pb. 310pp, $21.95
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