When I Fall in Love

Laughter is the best medicine, Dart (Beaches) wants us to believe, and she makes her case in a risky, wrenching story with a curious flaw. Though the novel offers endless punning and stand-up material, it's rarely funny, and even with the comic spotlight on the so-unlikely-it's-inevitable romance between two Emmy-level TV comedy writers, Lily Benjamin and Charlie Roth, neither their initial antagonism nor eventual alliance makes for laughs. And given the plot, readers do need those healing peals. In the opening pages, single mother Lily's teenage son, Bryan, is shot; yesterday a promising tennis star, he now faces life as a paraplegic. Lily's fianc , Mark Freeman, a handsome, kind, terminally unimaginative cardiologist (he gives her heart-shape presents and uses song lyrics to speak his own heart), wants Bryan and Lily to feel the tragedy, mourn their loss, adjust hopes downward. But then there is Charlie, known in the TV industry as the God of Jokes. Crippled in infancy, he was encouraged by his parents to use a no-holds-barred humor as his weapon against prejudice and self-doubt. Charlie preaches a medicine of ruthless humor, toughness and, above all else, gratitude--for the cripple, in his view, is freed from the illusion of physical perfection and lives truer to his soul. This main theme is echoed in the subplot, in which Lily's chubby lesbian sister confronts the siblings' judgmental, snobby mother. Other minor characters, like the ensemble of sitcom-writing co-workers, are burdened with a nearly unbearable comic banter attempting an outr irreverence. Though her formula is decidedly Hollywood, Dart's message, that people aren't what they look like, is sincere; her book takes serious and heartfelt looks at the bigotries of able-bodied folk and the realities of the disabled. (Apr.)