We can still be friends : a novel /

Upon reading Cherry's piercing tale of adulterous entanglements, two cliches come to mind. The first is "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"; the second, "Be careful what you wish for." Although both may succinctly capture the story's essence, common cliches are not at all indicative of the complexity of this most uncommon novel. Try to follow: Ava, who has been spurned by her lover, Tony, when he falls in love with Claire on the same day that Ava miscarries his baby, exacts retribution by asking Claire's husband, Boyd, to impregnate her. Convoluted, no? Well, Boyd does as Ava wishes, and the ensuing pregnancy, despite Ava's assurances and Boyd's protestations to the contrary, involves them all on emotional levels none anticipate, although they should have. Driven by dubious motivation and displaying disturbing moral judgment, the foursome, in all its permutations, cannot possibly survive the chain of events they set into motion, or can they? Cherry's take on modern love is both discerning and disquieting; in all, a very cautionary tale. --Carol Haggas

Poet, translator and novelist Cherry (My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers) fashions a subtly sexy mnage quatre for the postfeminist set, chronicling the fallout of a shattered romance. Divorced heart surgeon Tony Ferro dumps his lover, eminent women's studies scholar Ava Martel, for blond art historian Claire Buchanan. Ava decides it's time to stop playing nice. She is tired of living in "the darkened halls of sadness" and she wants a baby: if Tony won't sire it, then she figures that Boyd Buchanan, Claire's uxorious movie-producer husband, owes her one. She travels halfway across the country to present her reasoned case to Buchanan, who agrees to impregnate Ava, more as a bulwark against mortality than to hurt his wife. The novel moves swiftly between Claire's sumptuous home in the L.A. canyons, Tony's Chicago condo and Boyd's sprawling Santa Fe ranch. Cherry exhaustively probes the characters' motivations and intentions, relating them from all four points of view. The plot and anguished tone bear some similarity to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which provides the novel's epigraph. But with its blandly glamorous characters (the women are beautiful and hold Ph.D.s; Tony is a stud who is "bedded down by all the lovely women") and rather implausible dramatic turns, Cherry's work reads like a movie treatment. Appropriately enough, it's a guilty pleasure. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

As she realizes later on, college professor Ava Martell miscarries her lover Tony's child at the same moment that Tony, a Chicago surgeon, falls immediately in love with the coolly beautiful Claire, an art history professor whose marriage to Boyd, a Hollywood producer, has been studded with her extramarital affairs. After Tony breaks up with Ava on the telephone, assuring her that they can still be friends, Ava decides to strike back by getting pregnant with Boyd's child. As Ava, Tony, Claire, and Boyd take turns narrating the novel, often retelling the same scene from different points of view, it becomes nearly impossible for the reader to assign blame to any one of these four basically likeable if sometimes misguided people for the mixed results of Ava's plan. Cherry, a poet and writer of both nonfiction and six novels, including The Society of Friends, offers a nuanced portrayal of the complexity of love, and explores how our choices-made in anger, fear, or even from the worst of motives-can sometimes lead to unexpected epiphanies in our lives. Recommended for public libraries supporting literary fiction collections.-Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An unremarkable start--another thirtysomething woman contemplating her unfulfilled singleness--builds into a rich, wise, and gently humorous group portrait of adults looking to connect to someone or something beyond themselves. Ava, a professor of Women's Studies in Chicago, on sabbatical in Memphis, is informed by Tony, the stern, controlled, heart surgeon whose child she recently miscarried, that he's in love with Claire, a professor of Art History in LA, married to generous, devoted Boyd, a successful and long-sober movie producer. Ava, smart, vulnerable, but strong in her own way and not completely stable--Tony, we later find out, met her in the locked ward of his hospital--feels cheated of both a man and the child she was meant to have, and seeks a crazy, logical, justice: while vain, imperious Claire is in Chicago conducting her affair with Tony, Ava flies to LA, seeks out Boyd, and requests impregnation. Boyd, much better than Ava at suppressing an equally complex inner life, fears losing Claire, who has broken their long-standing unspoken agreement by letting her affair with Tony grow serious. Looking for a way to transcend himself, swayed by the momentousness of creating a life--something Claire can't do--Boyd capitulates. There's a lot going on here: Cherry (The Society of Friends, 1999, etc.) has smart things to say about academia, race, men, women, and identity, and, given her compellingly entertaining prose--she's controlled enough so that she's free to loosen up and play--this could have been a diverting, middle-brow soap just serious enough that readers could pat themselves on the back for enjoying it. But, told in passages that inhabit each of the four main characters' perspectives in turn, sometimes retelling the same scene from each view, it becomes a moving exploration of isolation and connection propelled by plot to a surprising, inevitable, and emotionally resonant epiphany that answers to both character and circumstance. A surprising and rewarding mix of technique, ideas, and insight. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.