Extraordinary Adventures

March 20, 2017
In Wallace’s strained new novel, 34-year-old Edsel Bronfman leads an ordinary life until the day he receives a phone call inviting him to spend a weekend in Destin, Fla., as the guest of a condo community. There’s only one catch: the invitation is for two, and Bronfman, who leads a circumscribed existence (to say the least) in Birmingham, Ala., doesn’t know any available women. And to make matters worse, he only has 79 days to find one before the offer expires. Improbable as it seems, that one phone call sends Bronfman’s orderly existence spinning off its axis. In short order, he has his apartment broken into, is threatened by the drug dealer who lives next door, joins the YMCA, attends an art exhibit where he is asked by two women to expose himself, goes with his dotty mother to visit the motel room where he was conceived, attends the funeral of a high school friend, and, most important of all, meets Sheila McNabb, who just might be Destin-worthy (if Bronfman doesn’t screw things up). Bronfman is one of those eccentric loners that one meets more often in fiction than in real life. It’s difficult to invest in his adventures because it’s difficult to believe in him. Wallace (Big Fish) is a master of domestic whimsy, but here his exploration of the joys of quotidian life seems disappointingly forced.

March 15, 2017
The newest from Wallace, best known for Big Fish (1998), offers a tenderhearted, likable contribution to the tradition of the Great American Chump Novel.Edsel Bronfman is a 34-year-old paper-pusher with a perfect work-attendance record and a lonely heart. The spectacularly unworldly Edsel is sitting one day as usual in his apartment in a drug-ridden Birmingham neighborhood when the phone rings, and the woman on the other end offers an all-expenses-paid trip to a beachside time-share community. The caveat is that he must bring a companion to be eligible, and Edsel--though aware at least dimly that this is a mere sales come-on--decides to seize his perhaps-never-to-be-repeated chance to find romance. He has 79 days. At work the next day, he summons the nerve to speak to the odd, gregarious woman who serves as greeter/receptionist in his office building; she and he have a halting but promising chat...and then he's off and running, or off and shambling/stumbling, anyway. Before long, with the help of an accidental meet-cute (or re-meet-cute), he's dating the greeter--the lively, flighty Sheila McNabb--and his sweetness has put him in the way of a couple of other mild flirtations, too. The first third of the book is a bit slow, mainly because Wallace has made Edsel so staggeringly and stereotypically naive, so helpless--no slate can be quite this blank. But once Edsel starts to fall for Sheila (and, sort of, also for a sturdy, kind police officer and for the damaged and vulnerable gamin-ish friend of his drug-dealing neighbor), it gains its footing and keeps it. A sweet-tempered, funny, surprisingly poignant romantic tale.

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April 15, 2017
Sometimes people just need a deadline to spur them to action. For 34-year-old social-misfit Edsel Bronfman, the come-on phone call from a Florida timeshare telemarketer provides the impetus to jump-start his nonexistent love life. The saleswoman tells Edsel that he has 79 days to act on their promotion of a free weekend by the beach and that the offer is for himself and a companionnot his mother, not his bowling buddy, but a romantic date. The trouble is, Edsel hasn't had one of those in 19 years. So when the flirty but flighty office receptionist willingly engages in conversation, Edsel takes this slimmest of all lifelines and clings to it with the determination of a man who desperately wants to see the ocean and definitely doesn't want to do it alone. As the kind, bumbling Edsel takes baby steps on the road to romance, he discovers aspects of his personality he never knew existed. Witty, winsome, and wise, Wallace's tale of pluck and luck is a sweet, satisfying diversion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)