JFDI BOOK CLUB

 REVIEW OF #67 EARLY MORNING RISER

Review by Tom

Katherine Heiny has written a well-reviewed/-received book full of wry, witty and yet (for me) unfunny observations about life in a small Michigan town. The seven chapters spread over a period of seventeen years constitute not so much a novel as the seven seasons of an above-average sitcom. As a result, other than the narrator Jane and her sister-in-law Aggie, the supporting characters come off as the sort of two-dimensional oddballs you got in Newhart or Cheers, not as flesh and blood in small-town America. 

The narrator, Jane, is a second-grade teacher who falls for local stud, Duncan, who has bedded a fair percentage of the local female population on the strength of looks like the Brawny Paper Towel Guy. Never mind that Duncan is a man of few words and a work ethic even more casual than his approach to sex, he has a laser-like aim for Jane’s G-spot, making him the embodiment of 1970s Man in a novel published by a woman in the 2020s about a period in the 21st C.  Weird. 

In the tradition of 1970s women, Jane longs to marry Duncan, who has vowed never to marry again after his ex-wife Aggie dumped him for Gary, who looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy, is unable to function in even a small social circle and yet somehow has a moderately successful insurance agency. But then Duncan does ask for Jane’s hand because marriage is the most expedient way for him and her to care for Jimmy, the simple-minded employee of Duncan’s woodworking business, who has been duped out of $80k in the book’s only scene with any real dramatic tension and yet one that ends abruptly in less than twenty pages. Duncan marries again, not so much out of love for Jane, but out of concern for his little buddy.  In classic 1970s style. 

Which may just be the point. Katherine Heiny is not writing a book about human relations as we’d like to think they’ve progressed, but rather as they are in Boyne City, Michigan, where her bio says she lived when she wasn’t in London, the Hague or her current residence of Bethesda, Maryland. So maybe she’s recalling a place she experienced in the 1970s. What she’s remembered, though, after time in big cosmopolitan cities, comes off as a view more condescending than affectionate for a slice of the populace content with, or confined to, life in a rural cloister. 

**½