My husband, whose name is, in reality, Bob, was paging through the Sunday paper, the New York Times Book Review, to be exact. He read aloud a particularly pungent description of a fictional cad: “He needs his soon-to-be-ex lover to buy his plane ticket home.” This slimy scenario sounded mighty familiar. In fact, the same maneuver was once perpetrated upon me by a guy named David Eddie. It only took me a moment to’ think to snatch the book review from Bob and locate the name of the author in question: David Eddie. In other words, the onetime soon-to-be-ex lover was, well, me.
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I’d heard David had written a novel, published the previous year in Canada. But after the Riverhead edition came out here, and that dejareview caught my attention, I thought I’d better read the book. My friend Gail, who also knows David but who didn’t rate a character rip-off in the book, bought me a copy.
Nor does reality ease up after David Henry returns to Toronto. He pals around with an old high school buddy, evades loan collectors, gropes some overdressed Asian woman named Kim, then brags about it in a letter–a letter later purloined by the New York girlfriend. He makes a splash–briefly–as a TV news writer, then returns to the squalor of would-be novelisthood. Fictional David has a terrible time writing fiction, resorting each tortured afternoon to
My copy is clearly labeled “a novel.” Inside, it’s plot and characters cribbed from life and reach filched from Amis, patched together with charmingly blunt prose. I don’t call that fiction. I call it proof David owes me $1,526 in back rent, plus the airplane ticket I bought him to leave me.
