A Few Boring Gossips
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In all of our lives, there are people who enjoy telling us the minutiae of their day. They take pleasure in sharing the most recent he-said, she said at their own office. Or the dilemma they faced at the grocery store. They’re boring.
So it’s a wonder that authors create such people as main characters for novels.
Two recent offenders are “The Dog Walker” by Leslie Schnur and “Being Committed” by Anna Maxted. These are books by women, presumably for women. If this prattle is what keeps us buying books and turning pages, then is it a reflection of the way we sound in person, in real life? If so, then ladies, we are dull. No wonder men like sports so much.
I would happily record examples of the dull-as-dishwater conversations and lives in these novels, but there is a journalistic code that says one mustn’t bore one’s readers to tears. Plot summaries alone will have to suffice and provide a sense of what’s going on. I hope you’ve just had an espresso.
In “The Dog Walker,” Nina Shepard is an Upper West Side divorcee and a publishing industry dropout. While looking for new work, she takes over her best friend Claire’s gig as a dog walker. Now dog-walking may seem fun, but there are lots of special instructions and routines (key word) that come with the territory. Nina kills a bit of the boredom by snooping through other people’s houses – which provides a great many things to describe in too great detail.
In the course of her work, Nina falls for hotshot Daniel, whose dog is in her care. But she only thinks he’s Daniel. He’s actually Daniel’s less cool twin brother Billy, who’s only borrowing his brother’s apartment for a while. Nina and Billy/Daniel bump into each other repeatedly and almost get involved. Then all manner of “Three’s Company” confusion ensues when Daniel comes back to town. To round out the action, there’s
The British version of this empty headedness is “Being Committed,” in which Hannah Lovekin is a 26-year-old private detective. Hannah was married briefly, at 20, to Jack. But due to a near indiscretion on her part and emotional childishness on both parts, they divorced. She’s now dating Jason, who wants to marry her. After she refuses, she reconsiders. Jason will take her back, but only if she meets a few conditions, including making amends with Jack. He wants her to have “closure” – in the common parlance.
Bad move. The flame between Jack and Hannah is reignited. Meanwhile a doozie of a subplot is brewing. When Hannah was five or six (she can’t remember), her father sent her upstairs with the words “Go and see what your mother is doing.” He did this knowing that her mother was in bed with another man. The poor child witnessed the affair, but doesn’t realize until page 265 that her father manipulated the situation.
All her life, Hannah thought of her mother as a pathetic wallflower. But now she sees that the woman was actually severely depressed and lonely. The two commence a healing process, which includes the mother shacking up with her former lover. But that’s not all: Hannah’s brother Ollie – a man in danger of becoming a version of their head-in-the-sand father – wants to leave his wife and infant. Hannah intervenes and gets things on the right track.
By the end, Jack and Hannah nearly miss each other, but are reunited. Ms. Maxted writes her convoluted, over-extended story in a crisp, slangy style, which is good. If you’re going to write down what is the equivalent of your grandmother’s gossip with her hairdresser, at least do it with flair. To ask for depth would be asking too much.
Which is a problem. As readers, we turn to novels to learn more about ourselves. To compare ourselves to characters, to think about how we would react or how we would behave. It’s helpful to mull the problems of other people, and if the characters are drawn well enough we begin to care about them. But these books are part of a generation of literature whose protagonists could be characters on “Friends.”
How ’bout those Mets?
A confrontation with a neglectful parent. Nina also suffers an injury and is hospitalized.
Nina and Billy get together in the end – and the reader gets another 309 pages closer to death without gaining any insight into anything in particular. There is no lesson, no moral to the story. Paper dolls have more dimensions than these characters. If you happen to really love dogs, you may find the trials and tribulations of a dog-walker worth reading. Otherwise, call your mom and ask her what she’s up to. It will be more interesting.