This week's inaugural selection falls under the Fiction/Debut category. The Lunch Weekly-provided description reads as follows:
Rainbow Rowell's FLAGGED, a fresh take on the office comedy in which a shy but endearing I.T. guy whose job is to monitor the company email falls in love with a girl in his office whose emails are constantly flagged, to Erika Imranyi at Dutton, at auction, by Christopher Schelling at Ralph M. Vicinanza.
Indichik says: Okay. Two things: First, there's no possible way I will ever read a book, short of a memoir of a life spent in the adult-film industry, by anyone named Rainbow. Second, "fresh take on the office comedy"has been an oxymoron for at least past ten years or so, given that at least one story in every lit mag I've read has featured a story about some poor sap just out of college (a doppelganger for the author five years ago) fooling himself into thinking's he's cleverer than everyone else his age because, just like everyone else, he wants to share the witty barbs he came up with while working at some awful job.
Ha ha, it's funny because working in a cubical is dull! Ha ha, it's funny because my boss is a moron! Ha ha, it's funny because my co-workers are weird!
Then tack on a gimmicky po-mo plot involving modern technology, as a vehicle for a cliched romance, in which no doubt some gorgeous, non-threateningly quirky girl inexplicably falls for an ugly, socially-inept nerd, and there's literary gold.
This concludes the inaugural edition of What's the Deal?
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2 comments:
Oh Claire. I've read Rainbow's manuscript (give her name a break, she's from Nebraska, not too-hip-for-its-own-good New York, "Indichik"), and she got a fresh, funny take. Her humor comes from well-set-up contexts and the characters, especially the secondary ones, are realistic, flawed, and round. I was surprised chapter after chapter. I wish I could buy stock in her book. (I'm snarky on New York only because I live in Hell's Kitchen and love it.)
I live in Omaha, from where said Rainbow hails, and I can personally testify that she's a dunce. Her self-indulgent, self-absorbed "column" in the Omaha World-Herald is fodder for 118-year old ninnies. It's as far away from journalism as one could possibly get. I can't imagine anything worthwhile spewing from her pen. In fact, I find it mortifying that this woman has gotten a book deal.
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