A certain stodgy reader we know picked up Jacqueline Carey’s “Good Gossip” and didn’t come up for air until page 157. That’s when the ending of a story called “A Diamond” (plot: narrator’s friend meets promising man) made him break the spell by saying “Wow!” out loud. (Ending: “‘He’s just like you,’ I said. But she was already turning away. ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?’ she said.”) Oddly, the Old Stodge didn’t even like these people: too-knowing New York women, dodging adulthood, cultivating an ingeniously ironic frivolity. Carey’s narrator, Rosemary, claims she watches only soaps on TV. “They’re still raw, as if the scenes had leapt right from someone’s idle fantasy onto the screen.” Some of this hit close to home: the Old Stodge has been known to strike such poses, too. Why did he keep reading?
Maybe the dead-on dialogue (“What a criminal she’s turned out to be,” says Rosemary of an adulterous friend) and the crafty structure. These interlinked stories almost make a novel: the book begins and ends with weddings, with another wedding (on a soap opera) at midpoint. The Old Stodge came to see Carey as a postmodern P. G. Wodehouse; her Drones Club is the seedy Horse Bar, with its pictures of famous racehorses. (Rosemary’s friends aren’t racing fans.) Carey’s New York, apparently so realistic, is as much a nevernever land as Wodehouse’s London: no crime, no drugs, no AIDS. The weddings yield no kids. The crucial difference is that Carey’s female updates of Bingo Little and Tuppy Glossop are wise to their own Peter Pan acts. The Old Stodge liked that a lot.
