cover image Peculiar Politics

Peculiar Politics

Katia Spiegelman, Katia Speigelman. Marion Boyars Publishers, $21.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-7145-2952-3

In this deliciously amusing, multi-barbed novel, condom-carrying New York City yuppies assess one another's looks, apartment sizes, possessions and date-ability with hilarious intensity. Hank Lowe, a rising star in his law firm, swings between love for and disgust with Christine Lustgarden, who has browbeaten him into marriage because she's pregnant. Hank's client Mike Blitsky (aka Mike Mauvais), a transvestite pimp who runs a ``call boy'' service, is writing an autobiography that Hank's ex-fiancee Dawn (whom he still loves) is editing. Dawn enlists her friend Katherine--an English lit scholar whose entangled love life makes the N.Y.C. subway map look simple--to dig up information on Mike's dark, sordid childhood. The finale, a wedding ceremony, is laugh-aloud funny. Spiegelman ( Soul Catcher ) humanizes her self-possessed characters even as she dispassionately observes their agitated mating dances. This modern version of the old fashioned comedy of manners is a bit like an atonal rendering of a Vivaldi concerto: sometimes weird and off-key, but often subversively funny and fresh. (May)