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I inhaled this book in 48 hours flat, impatient with meals, husband, sleep, work, and anything else that came between me and it. If you're looking to be absorbed and diverted, you couldn't do better. Still, I suspect that Laura Shaine Cunningham, whose previous books have been acclaimed memoirs, was aiming higher. In this tale of six 30-ish friends who gather on a stormy winter night in Lower Manhattan to celebrate the pregnancy of one of their number, Cunningham is trying to capture the hum and buzz of female bonding as well as the electricity of New York City --- no easy task.
The host, Jessie, is a journalist who has just had a sexual idyll in Colorado with a Native American rights activist and is now struggling to get dinner together and trying not to wait for him to call. Wactress (waitress + actress) Sue Ellen has just left her errant husband and is taking mental notes on her own anguish, Actors' Studio-style. Nina is on a diet, but she cooks constantly for her dying mother, in whose apartment she is staying for the duration. Martha, the villain of the piece, is a monster of control and materialism and not-so-passive aggression, with a flourishing real-estate business, an impotent fiancé, and a fertility problem. Fragile Lisbeth --- artist, model, and mystic --- still feels the presence of her long-gone married lover and sleeps a lot. And Claire, the guest of honor, is a redheaded musician and free spirit who conceived her child --- well, that would be telling, and I won't, even though this is hardly a plot-driven enterprise.
It is quite amazing, in fact, how much suspense Cunningham generates around these six women, considering that the main event is a dinner party rather than a murder. I became quite anxious over whether Jessie would get her call, Lisbeth would make it downtown in one piece, and awful Martha would leave the party before she ruined it. Part of the tension is generated by the city itself --- the fear-inspiring weather forecast ("the storm of the century"); the traffic; the apartment problems; the flashers and drug-dealers and men who press up against you on the subway. New York is genuinely a seventh character in BEAUTIFUL BODIES. Cunningham is very good at evoking the way urban minds jitter and teeter and sneak and weave like a bike in midtown, Big Life Questions sharing brain space with the stressful logistics of daily life.
Among the major preoccupations is the body (Nina tells Lisbeth, "I never thought I'd say this, but you're too thin for Vogue"; and Jessie chimes in, "No one is too thin for Vogue"), and what goes into and on it. Cunningham is extremely specific about clothes and food and drink --- testimony to the fact that obsessing about weight, wardrobe, and diet is a prime aspect of women's friendships, no matter how smart and "liberated" we are. This, I suppose, could be considered sufficient basis for calling the book BEAUTIFUL BODIES, but the title is a mistake. It sounds more like a marketing department's ploy than an author's deepest desire. It makes the novel sound sexy and trashy when it is neither.
And yet, I found myself disappointed. According to one review, BEAUTIFUL BODIES started life as a play in the 1980s, and unfortunately, the provenance shows. Cunningham seems to write more freely in the first half of the book, wherein each woman is caught in midstream, as it were, on the day of the party. Once they converge in Jessie's loft, though, it feels as if we're on stage; the action often seems mannered and self-conscious (lots of grand entrances and thwarted exits), and the characters become predictable. Cunningham also goes on a bit too long about nearly everything; the funny and wise bits tend to get lost in the shuffle.
But the main problem I had with BEAUTIFUL BODIES is that it's slight, despite its 358 pages --- too casual and snappy to be truly moving, yet too intelligent to be dismissed as a mere beach book. Perhaps its closest relative is Mary McCarthy's THE GROUP, another novel of women's friendship; although it's often been slammed by literary critics, readers have always relished it. I hope Cunningham writes a second novel that is just as readable as this one, but truer to her talents.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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