Bad Connections
A Novel
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Open Road Media
Published:17th Jun '14
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The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived
In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg—the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp.
While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly—or anyone who loves him—the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage—with Conrad’s movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements.
Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly’s maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her—or the reader.
“Ironic, witty and always graceful.” —Marilyn French, author of The Women’s Room
“Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking.” —Ann Douglas
“[Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson’s touches are all true.” —Harper’s Magazine
“Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad.” —The Village Voice
“The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity.” —E. L. Doctorow
“Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate.” —Judith Rossner
“A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women’s modern lives.” —Barbara Probst Solomon
ISBN: 9781480481251
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
264 pages