Julie Hecht

An NYC middle class woman who worries about inane details while chewing her macrobiotic food meanderingly narrates about her thought processes as she navigates her uneventfully eventful middle class life; a fixture is her shouty and impatient surgeon. She heroically overcomes commuting into the city by bus, has awkward run-ins with a pair of twins she doesn't really know around her summer house, and judges her monocultural way through a dinner hosted by Swedish-American friends. The tone is very chatty, the way a neurotic worrier might rattle on, endlessly fascinated by their own preoccupations.

Hecht's style of comedy is a very understated way of silently worrying about details that a hyper-sensitive person with embryonic social skills relentlessly fusses over. Days are ruined, or exalted, by the way a minor social awkwardness turns out, or by pondering what her surgeon would think if he could see her hotel room. If you can stand the narrator’s voice, her little exploits in mini-drama will make you smile, snigger and giggle; laughing out loud would be too heavy-handed for everyone involved.

In all, I’m not quite sure what to make of this collection. I suspect that these stories might actually be rather enjoyable when presented as individual chunks, the way they were originally published. But placing them next to each other, in book-form, is overkill; I found myself needing a little break between stories. On the whole, though, the tales are funny, and most managed to hold my attention all the way through.… (mehr)