"How to Be Single" (Atria Books)
By Liz Tuccillo
As women line up to see "Sex and the City" on the big screen, one of the HBO series' writers is debuting her novel about - what else? - dating and the single woman.
Aside from her career in television, Liz Tuccillo is best known for co-writing the bestseller "He's Just Not That Into You" with Greg Behrendt. That tough-love dating manual urged women to stop sitting by the phone and forget about the men who aren't pursuing them. "He might be lying in the hospital with amnesia, but more likely, he's just not that into you," is one sample bit of truth-telling.
Unfortunately, the women in Tuccillo's new novel do not seem to have read that book. Let's start from the beginning: our story is narrated by Julie Jensen, a 38-year-old New Yorker who is fed up with endless nights on the town in search of Mr. Right.
After a disastrous girls' night out that ends with a bar fight and a trip to the emergency room, Julie embarks on a trip to find out if women in other countries know the secret to being happily single.
So Julie learns about one-night-stands in Rio de Janeiro, gigolos in Bali, a man-drought in Sydney and open marriages in Paris. At the same time, she deals with her own relationship troubles as she becomes increasingly involved with a married man.
Meanwhile, Julie's four single friends are having their own problems with love back in New York. Georgia, a newly separated mother of two, dives back into the dating pool only to find that it's filled with sharks. Alice decides to settle down, but then begins to wonder if she is merely just settling. Ruby, tortured by her biological clock, wonders if she can handle single motherhood. Finally, Serena has an unlikely affair with a swami that makes her rethink her spirituality and her priorities.
With all those characters and their various crises, the book starts to feel a little crowded - like all six seasons of "Sex and the City" mashed up with "Eat, Pray, Love." As a result, Julie's New York friends don't quite develop into the fully fleshed-out characters they could be. Surprisingly, Serena, the most eccentric character of the four, becomes the most relatable as she struggles with the death of her employer.
Tuccillo writes in the ultra-casual tone of an e-mail to a friend, but doesn't flinch from the bleaker moments her characters experience. In fact, "How to Be Single" at times feels a little too bleak. As the women fret about their prospects, readers may be tempted to offer them some of the tough advice doled out in "He's Just Not That Into You."
"Back home, the statistics are telling us that it's very hard to find a good man, and that it's only going to get harder," Julie says to a Parisian companion. "It feels a little bit like a crisis."
That may be so, but a book about dating might benefit from a bit more fun and a little less crisis-management.
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