Pink Slip

A young woman's intraoffice, interfaith love affair collides with her devotion to her Italian-American family in another wise-cracking, romantic novel from Flannery O'Connor Award winner Ciresi. As in her Blue Italian, the protagonists in a problematical romance are an Italian woman and a Jewish man. Second-generation Sicilian Lisa Diodetto has just turned a mouthy 25 and shucked her job in New York and her rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn to take the improbable position of assistant manager in the editorial division of Boorman Pharmaceuticals, in Ossining, N.Y. There, she promptly falls in love with her available, rather uptight boss, Eben Strauss, who turns out to be the descendant of Holocaust survivors whose stories are in a collection of interviews Lisa has edited. Meanwhile, Lisa is working on her own work, Stop It Some More, a graphic corporate novel. The ""excerpt"" from the interviews offers a snippet of Ciresi's writing at its finest--thoughtful and lyrical. The novel, Lisa admits, is often ""artificially witty,"" and, alas, Ciresi's believable but uneven romance too often merits this same description. The chain-of-command and divergent background problems of Lisa and Eben ring true and cliche-free. What drives the big wedge between them is a crisis involving Lisa's beloved gay cousin, Dodie, that reminds the reader how long ago the book's time frame--1985--really is. Author tour. (Jan.) FYI: Pink Slip won the 1997 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Award for Fiction.