The More You Ignore Me

The unhinged narrator of Nichols’s amusing second novel (after Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder) is a self-styled “online justice-seeker and truth-teller” who has been trolling the wedding blog of some old friends. Believing that Charli (the bride) is cheating on Nico (the groom) with Chris (Nico’s brother and best man), the narrator feels he must alert the world before the wedding takes place. He also has a personal reason for posting his unwelcome comments—or “adroit badinage,” in his view—involving an unreciprocated first love, whom he calls Rachil. When the narrator is banned from commenting on the blog, a long flashback ensues, revealing Rachil to be an anagram for Charli and identifying the bride-to-be as the narrator’s unrequited love from college. The book unfolds as one long blog post, and as the story progresses, sentence by sentence, it becomes clear that the narrator was obsessed with Charli, Nico, and Chris in college, in much the same way he is now. Nichols writes brawny prose and has an easy touch with humor. (June)