Laura Rider's Masterpiece: A Review

This world is filled with hobbyists. You know who you are…. that lonely guy so ravenous to commune with ghosts, he spends an hour or two hunched over the library catalog to make sure he gets the latest copy of The Ghost Hunters on time… the Desert Storm veteran down in the basement building replicas of the planes he used to fly… the old lady whose cat talks to her without words each night on the couch as they share a can of tuna… a reserved Pillar of the Community who secretly watches the sky for a UFO to take him to a galaxy far far way… and my favorite, the scribblers, those women and men with torn notebooks full of poems that tell the truth at last, to the applause of absolutely no one but themselves.(Ok,Ok, that last one is me....)

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece is about two such people, a married couple who pursue their passions at the expense of their common sense. In the twelfth year of their marriage, creativity in the form of gardening, UFO memories, and romance novel writing has become a substitute for passion. (Freud called it sublimation.) When they do at last rediscover sex, it is not with each other but with the classy Jenna Faroli. Laura “looked into the grey eyes of Jenna Faroli and she silently asked this question: What, Jenna, is my calling? What is my true love?” The answer, it would appear, is Jenna herself. Jenna, however, is married to the staid intellectual Frank, and, though she and Frank condescendingly analyze the Riders' predilections over fancy French dinners, the fidelity of their marriage cannot stand the test of the Riders’ simple charm.

At first the driving force of the burgeoning attraction between Charlie and Jenna is Laura, perhaps because Jenna’s fame as a radio show hostess dazzles her or maybe because she is repressing a mid-life case of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. For whatever reason, Laura thinks watching Charlie and Jenna will give her the insight and inspiration she need to become an author of a groundbreaking romance novel. Of course, control of the situation gets beyond her and Charlie and Jenna get, ahem, involved.

When Laura Rider submits her idea for a “conscious romance novel” to a literary curmudgeon at a weekend workshop, the teacher snaps, reminding her severely that “Love is savage, People. Sexual love blows apart your assumptions, your sense of self, your place in the world. It’s a hurricane--- it’s a nuclear bomb. Don’t kid yourself that Eros is a cute little winged angel with a rubber arrow. That arrow will… kill.” In response to these words of wisdom, Laura simply titters and goes on following her bliss. It seems she never did like literature much anyways. What she wanted was not the Nobel Prize in Literature, but rather what we all want: a little fun. Or as Freud would put it… um… Well, she isn’t hurting anyone by dreaming, is she?

This is, as the author herself says, a very fun “little poof of a book.” Laura Rider’s Masterpiece is sophisticated, laugh-out-loud funny, and yes, good and juicy.

Come see the beautiful Jane Hamilton read on May 17th at 2PM, courtesy of the Blue Island Public Library.