Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery, by Susan Juby
Juby, Susan (2008). Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery. NY: HarperTeen. 352 pages.
Can I just preface this with a confession? I’m a big fan of Susan Juby’s hysterical novels that are quiet about their quirky characters and I don’t understand why the author (and her work) are not as popular in the U.S. as they apparently are in Canada. With that admission out of the way, I must say that I (not unexpectedly) really enjoyed Getting the Girl. A slight departure from the “Alice” trilogy of novels that received the most press stateside, Juby’s latest novel features a male narrator and lightly lampoons the private detective mystery genre.
The lowdown: When Sherman Mack, the short and slightly dorky sophomore son of a would-be burlesque dancer, discovers that his crush, the mysterious and older Dini, is dating the asshole-ish school lacrosse star, he worries that Dini will become one of the school’s “Defiled” girls. An antisocial school tradition, the “Defiled” is the name given to the unfortunate girls marked by an unknown student for ostracism by the student body. Since the last known “Defiled” was Mr. Lacrosse’s girlfriend, Sherman has reason for concern. Adopting the persona of a hardboiled detective and guided by an instruction manual for shamuses, Sherman balances his investigation of the “Defiled” with his attempts to enter a special cooking program at school.
One of the things I really like about Juby’s novels is her willingness to not only incorporate but make important what would seem to be incidental or comparatively unimportant details of her characters’ everyday lives. Juby juxtaposes Sherman’s investigation with his attempts to perfect his cooking, detailing the tools required for each and comparing the personae Sherman seems to be trying on. Given a stake-out or a home economics class as a setting, Juby calls attention to the details that both render the scene realistic and that become laughable accessories to the action.
As you know, I love a good mystery and, while Getting the Girl didn’t disappoint (it had a suitably tricky ending), it reads a bit like the author’s first mystery. That said, Juby doesn’t over-emphasize the mystery element and avoids cashing in on generic tropes; if anything, the novel was not mysterious enough. But that’s really a minor criticism. My one other beef: I didn’t like the title. The book wasn’t really–I don’t think, anyway–about “getting” any girl. Rather, it was more about getting the person who was “getting” (in the metaphorical sense) the girls.
In the end, I only have two pretty minor criticisms of Juby’s first (hopefully not last) venture into mystery. I have to say: she had me for sure when she name-checked Michael Connolly.