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Resumen
Resumen
Odile is a lovely 23-year-old art school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a 25-year-old shirker who's most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set in February 1999, this is the story of two people caught between the uncertainty of their futures and the all-too-brief moments of modern life.
Resumen
No one dies in Office Girl. Nobody talks about the international political situation. There is no mention of any economic collapse. Instead, this novel is about young people doing interesting things in the final moments of the last century. Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who's most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set in February 1999, Office Girl is the story of two people caught between the uncertainty of their futures and the all-too-brief moments of modern life.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
In Joe Meno's new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics ("It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone"). If the reader doesn't recognize the territory being mined by the time Jack and Odile begin covering their neighborhood in cryptic graffiti credited "ALPHONSE F." Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned) equips the book with two alternate titles-Bohemians and Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things-that ought to straighten things out. High on quirk and hipster cred, the novel is light as air, surprisingly unpretentious, and extremely kind to its larky, irony-addled protagonists. Meno is really the heir to Douglas Coupland, who introduced this crowd in 1991's Generation X. However, Meno's sympathy for his heroes' frustrations makes his novel more than merely endearing. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Most tales about fleeting yet indelible love affairs are set in summer. Meno's story of tenuous ardor between two artistic, ambivalent, and disaffected misfits takes place in winter in Chicago. We first meet Odile as she rides her bicycle through the snow. An art-school dropout, she has held 17 lousy jobs in three years and expresses her frustrations by drawing lewd graffiti with a silver marker. Skittish art-school graduate Jack is also adrift, riding his bike in the snow while carrying a small silver tape recorder to capture the stark or strange or sublime sounds of the city. The two meet while working in a Muzak sales office. It's 1999, the faltering end of a century of brutality and invention, and nothing seems anchored or meaningful. Bold and angry Odile starts a guerrilla art movement of two in favor of unimportant things, and sweet Jack reluctantly joins her in risky street performances. Flashbacks reveal the sources of Odile and Jack's wariness of romance and ambition. Following his encompassing drama of family and war, The Great Perhaps (2009), Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
READING "Office Girl," Joe Meno's quasi-experimental novel about former art-school students in late-'90s Chicago, I honestly couldn't tell if the author intended for us to cheer for or laugh knowingly at the lead character - a beautiful, alienated waif named Odile, who likes to deface advertisements with doodles of hairy genitals. On the one hand, the novel, Meno's sixth, reads as a parody of self-obsessed art-school types, complete with Serge Gainsbourg posters, self-cut bangs and Velvet Underground records. On the other, it reads as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit. The book's alternate titles, "Bohemians" and "Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things," only add to the confusion, insofar as both seem to wink at the reader. As for the main title, it too misleads: "Office Girl" actually devotes equal if not greater attention to an office boy, a disaffected 25-year-old art-school graduate named Jack, who spends his days biking around the city, taperecording the sounds of everyday life. By chance, both young heroes find work in telephone sales at the same Muzak company. Both are also miserable. Odile fears that all her art is insignificant; she can't stop quitting jobs, and she doesn't know why she fooled around with some gross guy at her last one, selling orthopedic supplies. Jack is depressed; his wife has left him. He also has a personal history that includes ineffectual wrist-slitting. Lately he's been doing inappropriate things in public, like parading around an office holiday party with his testicles resting, exposed, on a punch ladle. All of this should be darkly hilarious, and occasionally it is: I laughed out loud when Jack's mother discovers her son on the floor of her apartment, masturbating into a vacuum nozzle with his shirt over his head. But somehow the book is never quite funny enough. The scenes are rarely developed, and some are little more than shorthand. "Question," Meno writes: "Is Jack still in love with his estranged wife? Answer: Yes, he is. Of course he is. But Berlin is so far. And here. Here is this girl." It's clever, sort of, but it also seems as if he's attempting a lot with too little. What's more, the dialogue between the main characters defies belief, as in this passage when they meet: "So I'm starting my own movement and I was wondering if you'd like to join it," she says. "What's your movement about?" "It isn't about anything." "No?" "Basically, we just sniff liquid paper and try and think of interesting things." "That sounds O.K." "Do you want to join it?" "All right." Even allowing for the importance of Wite-Out in the pre-digital era, did people ever talk this way? Not that Meno - whose previous books include "Hairstyles of the Damned," a cult hit about punk rockers in the early '90s - is obligated to peddle verisimilitude. But if he's going for theater of the absurd, he undermines it with his more self-consciously poetic writing, like this empty riff: "And he does not know why this is his favorite sound of all time, only that there is something so perfect in its briefness, in its sense of longing." There is also barely anything in the book resembling a plot. After Meno spends two chapters introducing Odile and Jack, the reader hardly needs to begin Chapter 3 to know that these unhappy hipsters will meet and find solace in each other's arms. At Odile's urging, the two also stage various Situationist-like acts of defiance against bourgeois convention, like impersonating ghosts on. a city bus and riding a corporate elevator while wearing ski masks and holding balloons. Amid these events, there is much talking and hand-wringing about artistic greatness. There are also sporadic references to Odile's lust for her married ex-boss. But since we never really meet the guy, her decision to throw him over for Jack is neither surprising nor especially satisfying. Yet there are small gems amid the non sequiturs. After Odile leaves Jack, he observes: "Young persons who had been sleeping together act like sitting in cubicles beside each other means nothing. And then it does. Means nothing. . . . Everything slows to gray-green gloom. And it's like nothing interesting has ever happened to anybody." Meno also impressively captures postadolescent female angst and insecurity: "And this is what makes her so mad as she's riding home from work that night. The realization that, after all, she knows she is nothing special, not to anyone but herself, and does that even count?" Fittingly for a novel about young artists, "Office Girl" also features illustrations, by Cody Hudson, and photos, by Todd Baxter. Possibly my favorite thing in the book is the drawing of 15 tiny penises in various states of arousal and flaccidity. Fresh and funny, the image also encapsulates the mortification, confusion and excitement that define so many 20-something existences. But ultimately, "Office Girl" feels so thinly sketched that it answers Odile's anxious question in the negative: No, it doesn't count if you're nothing special to anyone but yourself. Lucinda Rosenfeld's new novel, "The Pretty One," about three sisters, will be published in February. Two art-school types stage Situationist-like acts of defiance against bourgeois convention.
Kirkus Review
Sometimes things just don't work out, no matter how hard we wish they would. But there's irony, so we have that going for us. Right? The talented Chicago-based Meno (The Great Perhaps, 2009, etc.) has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999. The titular protagonist is Odile, the arty, brazen and fearless 23-year-old who loves graffiti, the Velvet Underground's "After Hours," riding her bicycle around the city, and the married guy she can't have. She's also chronically unemployable, generous to a fault and susceptible to dumb mistakes like offering a sexual favor to a co-worker who can't keep his mouth shut, forcing Odile to quit and go take a crap job in customer service. Jack is a few years older and a spiraling tragedy of his own making. An art school graduate with no creative traction, he's devastated by his abrupt divorce from Elise, to whom he was married less than a year. To fill his soul, Jack records things, and Meno turns these fleeting sounds into mini-portraits. "Everything is white and soft and dazzling," he writes. "And Jack, in front of his apartment building, can't help but stop and record as much of it as he can. Because it's a marvel, an explosion, a cyclone of white and silver flakes." The encounter between these two creative iconoclasts is less courting and more epiphany, as they discover the amazing and transformative effects of love with a joy as nave as that of children. Their story can be artificially cute, with secret messages scrawled on city walls and dirty magazines awash with surrealistic Polaroid snapshots. But when things Get Weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying the lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Meno's 2004 novel, Hairstyles of the Damned, retains a loyal cult following, but that won't happen with this Y2K-set book. If this is a send-up of romantic comedies, then Meno isn't doing enough subverting. He still intimately knows his milieu: young, disaffected white couples wrestling with work, love, and the uncaring urban landscape. The protagonists here are art school dropout Odile, who huffs Wite-Out at her many office jobs, and mopey graphic designer Jack, whose wife has just left him for Berlin. They begin an affair and a micro-art movement. Sort of. "Jack puts his hands on her breasts from behind, and she does not say anything or move his hands away, and almost by accident he murmurs, `I love you,' and she says, `What?' and he says, `Nothing. I just had to sneeze.'" Photographs by Todd Baxter and drawings by Cody Hudson are interspersed with mixed success. VERDICT Meno's descriptions of snow and Chicago's landscape can be lovely, even moving, but there's a problem when these passages are more compelling than the human characters and the plot.-Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
