Playing with Boys

Despite therapy for it (from a psychotherapist/commercial pilot, no less, and I recommend him), I am still afflicted by a lingering anxiety about flying.  At least I can get on a plane now, though, and magazines or light reading help to distract me at thirty thousand feet--an excellent reason, I think, to have bought a novel for my trip this Tuesday to teach in the Pine Manor low-res MFA program. 

I got Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Playing With Boys, her 2004 follow-up to the chica lit breakout The Dirty Girls Social Club.  (And $5.99 in hardcover at Walgreen's--you can't beat it.)  I just finished the first chapter, and I'll share this little bit from the voice of one of her co-narrators, Alexis:

As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast.  Tortillas now outsold bagels.  Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup.  Wal-Mart carried plantains, yuca, and Goya products.  Kraft in the U.S. had come out with something they called "mayonesa," a Mexican mayonnaise with lime.  Why?  Not because they were nice.  Because they had to.  The top FM stations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago now broadcast in Spanish, and the U.S. had become the world's fourth-largest Spanish-speaking country.  I was one of those lucky people who had long existed in a United States that spoke Spanish and English with matching facility.  I swung with ease between the cheesy comedy of Sábado Gigante and the cheesy comedy of WB sitcoms.  Some academic types, like my professors at Southern Methodist University, called people like me bicultural.  But with Latinos poised to make up one in four Americans in the blink of a big brown eye, I preferred to call it American.

And here's one more clip:

Dangit.  He was married?  I'd been hoping he wasn't, and was a little surprised, given the shameless way the boy had flirted with me, that he was married.  Or at least I thought he'd been flirting.  But that was the problem with me.  I misread men all the time.  I thought they wanted me when all they wanted was a sandwich.

I laughed out loud.  Playing with Boys will be a frothy counterbalance to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is 2600+ pages of Bible-paper, dense with theory, and from which I'll be teaching while I'm Boston.  It's very, very good, and my friend, the lovely Laurie Finke at Kenyon, co-edited--but, as you can imagine, it's way less fun.  Give me drama, sex, quips, and cultural observations any day.

LNK-ORD-BOS, here I come.