It’s knowing, with a winking tone that belies Isa’s youth and (relative) inexperience. This opening establishes the tone and priorities of the novel: it’s mannered, full of old-fashioned syntax like “one must” and an understanding of gender relations that could have emerged in 1890 or 1957 or last week. A person should never take on a city with an empty stomach, and I am always hungry.” “Before landing at JFK, I had three Bloody Marys and an extra piece of cake that fell apart in my mouth. Full of verve and authority and aphorisms, Isa’s narration is charming and appropriately Mid-Atlantic - she’s just arrived in New York from London, after all, even if it is 2012. “My mother always told me that to be a girl one must be especially clever,” she says in the opening line. The protagonist is Isa Epley, worldly and motherless at twenty-one, who seems to have learned everything she knows about womanhood from 1940s film stars and midcentury screwball novels. Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados’s debut novel, is about that kind of cultivated femininity. Early 2000s tabloid culture and YouTube makeup tutorials must have played a hand as well - it certainly wasn’t my mother’s influence that had me attempting a cateye and red lip at the age of twelve. Where did you learn how to be a woman? Was it from your mother, your sister? An older friend? A diva on TV? I sometimes joke that I learned how to be a woman from Wong Kar-Wai movies and the Wikipedia article on Mae West.
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