Manufacturer: Random House
Beginning in fifth grade, Phoebe Fine, the daughter of an oboist in suburban New Jersey, finds that love is a risky game to play. There is Roger Mancuso, who offers Phoebe her first cigarette, her first kiss, and her first experience of loss. There is Spitty Clark, the frat boy and inveterate party animal who's a possible criminal but also somehow a man of honor. Later on, as a young woman living in New York, Phoebe crosses the path of arrogant Pablo Miles (né Peter Mandelbaum), who licks her hand moments after they meet. And so it goes, as Phoebe struggles to reconcile her conflicting desires for safety and adventure, sympathy and conquest. Lucinda Rosenfeld relates Phoebe's serial, seriocomic encounters with freshness, range, economy, and emotional precision:"She understood the jealousy emaciation aroused in other women.""She couldn't persuade herself to spend an entire hour's salary on a piece of bread and three zucchini rounds.""Their first date was more like an appointment. To screw."Unexpected, absorbing, and likely to elicit strong identification among men and women alike, What She Saw . . . serves up acute observations and serious ideas--Phoebe's recognition of her complicity in the disenchantments she endures, the intersection of Eros and ambition--with stealthy charm. The sum of these parts is an intriguing, funny, sharp, and occasionally devastating rendition of that most basic and crucial of human stories: growing up. The vision in What She Saw . . . is perfect. Sometimes in a moment of limbo or confusion, it's advisable to make a list. An inventory of accomplishments, a chart of pros and cons. Lucinda Rosenfeld's first novel takes as its form a list of past boyfriends. Each section finishes the sentence begun in its title, What She Saw... in "Roger Mancuso, or 'The Stink Bomb King of Fifth Grade.'" Later, in college, it's "Humphrey Fung, or 'The Anarchist Feminist.'" The book's shape and humor come from the gathering logic of this catalog, how our heroine is repeatedly fooled by the illusi...
