Getting Over It
by Anna Maxted
Regan Books, 416 pp., $24
In the race to capture that Bridget Jones’ Diary magic, Anna Maxted’s Getting Over It is a particularly freaky entry. It is British; it is blithe; it features a madcap, screwed-up heroine. Check so far, at least in general outline. But here all that mad-girl humor is put in service of rollicking episodes like the heroine’s father’s sudden death and her mother’s consequent suicidal depression.
Maxted is a contributing editor for Cosmopolitan UK, and darling, it shows! On rare occasions, this weird juxtaposition of Cosmo-girl freestyle and existential horror works, kind of — for example when a doctor “is explaining to my sobbing, shaking mother and my silent, still grandmother. There is brief confusion when he says my father suffered a cardiac arrest and has now ‘gone on to another place’ but the hurried addition of ‘I mean, he’s dead’ clears it.”
But more often we are trapped with Helen, our babbling, narcissistic heroine, who isn’t half as charming as her creator seems to think. In fact, she’s a bit of a horror: “When my mother snipes, I don’t snipe back. I don’t, for example, say, ‘He was my one father. It’s all right for you, you can re-marry.'” Similar saintlike reserve and empathy come after the funeral, as a relative weeps over her grandmother’s grief. “‘ … losing a child, a child — no parent should ever have to bury a child.’ … ‘My father was fifty-nine,’ I say coldly. ‘He was hardly a child.’ This is, I know, a truly evil statement, but I have no room in my heart for other people’s whinging grief. I can just about stomach my mother’s.”
In fairness, we are meant to see that Helen is repressing her own feelings, and crumbling from within and so forth — but presumably we are also meant to sympathize, and Maxted’s breezy Cosmo Goes to a Funeral! style makes it tough. So does the fact that Helen is exasperatingly stupid about men, supposedly because of unresolved papa-issues. And then there are Helen’s friends, mostly hateful neurotics who viciously undermine each other at every opportunity.
Of course, there is also a love story. Inanely contrived problems keep our Helen from the veterinarian-in-shining-armor she is clearly (painfully clearly) meant for, and whom she just as clearly does not deserve.
As if paternal death and maternal suicide attempts weren’t sufficiently weighty burdens for this comedy’s frail shoulders, at the end Maxted drags in a spectacularly sadistic, abusive relationship which Helen is meant to sort out. At this point I was more than ready to get over it and check out.
This article appears in July 7 • 2000.