Newspaper Article

THE SMALL PRESS / So Happy Together

Kio Stark. Kio Stark is a writer in Brooklyn

1999

Overview

Lou and Renata, a playwright and a would-be actress, meet in a hazy season of Vermont summer stock. Love is a three-page whirlwind. They get married and embark, as though boarding a ship, on a life of devotion to each other and their ideals. Early in the marriage, Renata works a day job at a newspaper. \"My coworkers had no idea that I was debating the reasons people step aside from a life of complementary colors and practical cars onto a path where dreams would not be sublimated by expensive attractive possessions,\" she muses. And it goes on. \"Lou and I were seduced by the unknown, where love and ambition might destroy each other. And us.\" Bauer's premise - a character study of people who depart from social norms and their ho-hum roots - has potential. The problem is, Renata and Lou turn away from the values and hopes they'd \"been born to\" early in the novel, and spend the rest of it congratulating themselves. As unbecoming as this might be in real live humans, it's insufferable in fictional characters. Renata auditions and auditions (and somewhere between chapters gets a few parts), but feels like she's \"spent her whole life waiting - for Lou, for callbacks, for that part she really wanted, for someone - anyone - to notice her.\" Time passes again. Lou's Hollywood success declines. Always, Lou and Renata, we are told, are sustained by their deep, sticky love for one another. They have lots of sex. They take baths together. We are, it seems, to admire them.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC