ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

This is another of my Half Price Books clearance sale impulse buys. I was going to register it before I went to California in May, but my problem was that I hadn’t read enough of the book to actually really have anything to say. According to the cover, someone at the Washington Post has judged this book “beautiful, incandescent, heartbreaking, exhilarating” and closes by remarking that “one cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this.” Having read the book now, I consider this kind of an exaggeration.

The book is about an author of a series of travel guides titled “The Accidental Tourist” for people who hate traveling and whose primary objective is to deemphasize the impression that one is in fact away from home while traveling. Mostly business travelers. Anyway, not very far into the book, like two pages in fact, you find out that his marriage is basically dead and then you find out that so is his child. A lot of the book is quite dull. The main character Macon is a bit stodgy and has a “system” for everything, which I generally respect because I too have systems by which I handle common tasks. However, the book goes into somewhat pedantic detail in describing all this.

Macon owns a vicious-but-well-meaning Pembroke Welsh Corgi and through his efforts to kennel this animal, meets a woman named Muriel who proceeds to shake his shit up. He doesn’t apparently love her or her choleric little boy, but shacks up with her to the dismay of his family. Meanwhile his sister marries his editor. Then his wife wants to get back together. He dumps Muriel and goes to Paris. She follows him. He throws out his back. Wife arrives to save the day. He leaves with Muriel.

How romaaaaantic!

The funnest part of this book is that I was traveling while I read it, and as the type of person who has systems for things, I enjoyed the fact that thematically, my reading material matched what I was doing that week. It was an all right book, but nothing particularly jaw-dropping or special. My boyfriend tells me that the movie was so-so. According to IMDB, Muriel is played by Geena Davis, which I think sounds totally crazy and has led me to seriously wonder whether the movie is actually based on the book at all. The book goes out of the way to paint Muriel as an extremely awkward, frizzy, frumpyskinny, and generally neurotic weirdo. Also as being extremely young. Course, it occurs to me now that the movie came out almost 20 years ago so probably Geena Davis was more age appropriate at the time. Well, nevermind. I’m just having trouble picturing it without having seen this.

The other interesting part is that Muriel makes reference to having known someone named Dana Scully when she was younger, and at first my curiosity was piqued because that is the name of a major character on that program The X-Files, but later I learned that the character was a man and then decided it must be a mysterious coincidence. I happen to feel that although Dana Scully isn’t a particularly shocking or strange name, it’s still interesting that two different parties apparently came up with the same name independently of each other.

Overall, this book was an okay read, but I didn’t find it all that exciting so I’ll probably either give it to a coworker for travel reading material or just leave it in an airport somewhere. I’m going to Indianapolis on June the 11th so maybe I’ll leave it at the airport there. I just can’t shake the idea that themed reading is totally fun, so I think it’ll be great for somebody to pick up a book about a travel guide author, maybe just before they get on the plane.

Better yet, leave it on the plane itself!