Guy Novel — Michael Ryan

Guy Novel marries a thriller to a shameless love story and fun ride, what Graham Greene might have called an entertainment.It takes place over one month in 1996, from early August to early September, as the Taliban were about to take over Afghanistan, Bill Clinton was running for re-election, most people still used answering machines, and HotMail became the latest new thing.The story is told retrospectively but vividly by Robert Wilder, a less-than-successful LA comic who creates big problems for himself by picking up a gorgeous bank clerk on the afternoon of his wedding. These problems have the happy resolution of the conventional plot of comedy: boy meets girl, boy loses girl (twice), boy gets girl (and vice-versa), but there are lots of turns along the way and lots of jokes and lots of play with the gendered conventions of Romance.The political and historical moment enters with a vengeance halfway through the story, and spirits our he-roes to places as different as a five-star Paris hotel, Clinton's White House, and a yurt in Turkmenistan, while Robert learns something about loving another person for exactly who she is.Not an easy lesson to learn--for him or for any of us--but the medicine goes down effortlessly with the clarity and grace and laugh-out-loud humor of Michael Ryan's widely-circulated, wildly-celebrated writing.