Glover's Mistake

Starred review from May 4, 2009
It's hard to like a self-appointed cultural critic, but teacher-by-day, blogger-by-night David Pinner makes it schadenfreude-fun when he turns his loathing scope on his closest friends and then himself in Laird's latest (after Utterly Monkey
). David, an oafish 35-year-old Londoner, reunites with Ruth Marks, the gorgeous and famous 47-year-old American artist who briefly taught him (and promptly forgot him) in college. David falls for her while she's in town for an artist-in-residence program, but Ruth prefers David's bartending flatmate, Glover, a 23-year-old virgin grappling with faith and the father he's left behind. Though David succinctly lambastes the very idea of love (“Information killed it”), he plots to wedge himself between Glover and Ruth—sometimes with an epically intense dishonesty. Whether David is saving his sometimes overwhelmingly flawed friends from a tragic error or making one himself—or both—the book offers a bit of twisted redemption in its hilarious nod to selfishness of all stripes.