Let's Not Do That Again by Grant Ginder

Published by ‎ Henry Holt and Co. on April 5, 2022

Let’s Not Do That Again is the story of a mother-daughter relationship that frays due to poor communication and mistaken beliefs. The family drama offers a typical reconciliation moment, followed by a dramatic moment that straddles the border between horrific crime fiction and dark comedy. A couple of romantic subplots round out the novel. One involves a senator’s gay son and an FBI agent. The other asks the recurring question: When two people in the early stages of love do something really awful together, will it bring them closer together or send them to separate prisons?

Nancy Harrison is a congressional representative who is running for a Senate seat. She won her husband’s seat in Congress after he died. During her Senate campaign, her daughter Greta drunkenly joins a French nationalist protest in the streets of Paris and hurls an empty champaign bottle through the window of everyone’s favorite overpriced restaurant. Greta has no interest in nationalism because, without immigration, the US would have no Italian food. Greta’s motive involves her animosity toward her mother, stoked by her paternal grandmother and by her sexual attraction to Xavier, a French nationalist whose project is to determine “how wholly corrosive love can be.”

Greta’s act of defiance is captured on a cellphone video. After it goes viral, Nancy’s political opposition accuses Greta of being a communist while branding Nancy as the world’s worst mother (something to do with “family values”). The novel is rooted in the unfortunate reality that attacking politicians based on the actions of their children is a thing now.

Nancy sends her son Nick to retrieve Greta from Paris. Nick is gay, has slept with most of the gay men in New York, and is close to Greta, having raised her while Nancy was making laws in Washington. Greta, whose issues with her mother are explained as the story marches forward, thinks Nancy is happy to have a gay son as a symbol of her progressive values. Nick, on the other hand, has spent his life cleaning up the messes made by Nancy and Greta. He’s getting sick of that role, leading the reader to wonder how he’ll respond to the final and biggest mess that comes near the novel’s end.

The other two characters of note are Nancy’s campaign manager Cate Alvarez and her co-worker Tom Cooper. They don’t benefit from the same character development as the Harrison family members, but they play an important role in the novel’s key event. How that event will affect their blossoming relationship is another question that the plot will need to address.

Let’s Not Do That Again is marketed as a comedy. The novel’s darkest moment is best viewed in that light. As a comedy, however, the story offers few laughs. There are elements of parody in the novel’s take on politics and privilege, and an ongoing joke about Nick’s attempt to base a musical on the life of Joan Didion is amusing. The novel’s humor is largely infused in Grant Ginder’s descriptive writing. Walls in a restaurant are “the color of radioactive egg yolks.” Greta refers to a co-worker at an Apple store as “annoying, the sort of person who couldn’t pick up on a hint if it had its hands around his balls.”

The novel is carefully constructed. Seemingly unimportant details in the early pages turn out to have significance. The novel’s lesson is the familiar stuff of light fiction — families are a mess but, in the end, we’re glad to have them. A less familiar lesson is that new beginnings and fresh starts are a myth. We can’t detach from a past that shaped us; we can only try to make sense of the past so that we can do better tomorrow. The novel’s most interesting question is whether it’s possible to live with the guilt of keeping secrets from those we love if revealing those secrets will harm others that we love. Maybe the novel’s lessons and questions aren’t profound, but the story that embodies them is entertaining.

RECOMMENDED

Driver's Education by Grant Ginder

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 8, 2013 

Driver's Education is a multigenerational story in the sense that the primary characters are a young man, his father, and his (mostly unseen) grandfather. As is common in modern novels, both time and point of view shift frequently.

In sections of the novel labeled "What I Remember," Colin McPhee talks about his life. He starts in 1956, at the grand opening of a theater called the Avalon. Movies and the Avalon play a large role in his young life, particularly after his mother dies. Colin's love of movies apparently motivates his desire to write screenplays and in 1974, after he moves to Hollywood and sells one, he rather improbably reunites with Clare, a former Avalon co-worker who is now an aspiring actress. When Finn is born, Clare comes to resent Colin's love for his son (she actually tells him that he should love Finn less). At this point, believing not a word of Colin's story, I was asking "Who are these people?" They certainly aren't people I recognize.

The screenplay, Colin's only successful writing venture, is followed by twenty years of writers' block. At some point Colin begins taking care of his father (largely absent from his life after Colin's mother died) who had a stroke and apparently suffers from a form of dementia. Nearing the end of his life, Colin's father feels the need to drive his car (Lucy) again, so he calls Finn and asks him to bring the car from New York to San Francisco.

Finn is an assistant story editor on a reality TV show that resembles The Real World.  His job is to "guide" the reality. Finn and his friend Randall recover Lucy and begin a road trip. Along the way Finn tells Randall some tedious stories that his grandfather used to tell. Finn wants to document those stories and brings along a video camera for that purpose. They go to Pittsburgh because Finn's granddad has a story about saving a man from a collapsing building in Pittsburgh. They crash a medical supply sales convention in Columbus because Finn's granddad fell in love with a female pilot in Columbus. They track down a baseball in Chicago because Finn's grandad told a story about nudging a ball hit by Ernie Banks from foul into fair territory. The road trip eventually turns into a movie. Toward the end of the novel, Finn interviews Randall (again on film) so that Randall can complain about how Finn edited reality when he made his movie. We also learn from Randall that Finn has been an unreliable narrator.

The novel's theme, as expressed by Randall, is this: Colin values realism (or at least he values cinéma vérité) and hates Finn for choreographing reality while Finn wants Colin to be a better liar. That conflict is apparently meant to supply dramatic tension while saying something weighty about the way people create their own realities. Neither goal is realized. Driver's Education creates an emotional distance between the reader and the characters simply because the reader doesn't care one way or another about contrived experiences that we aren't meant to believe. It's ironic that a novel about the fabrication of reality fabricates reality so poorly.

The description of the trip through Ohio -- "Everything is extremely pretty in a very un-pretty way; interesting because there's a phenomenal lack of interest" -- could stand as a summary of the book. Grant Ginder's prose is pretty while the novel's content is uninteresting. Taking a road trip to document an old man's stories might be an intriguing premise for a book, but not this book. Grandpa's stories are dull, there are only a few of them (it's surprising that a cross-country trip would hightlight only three cities), and the discovery that Finn's versions of his grandfather's stories aren't entirely truthful is hardly a world-shattering revelation.

It's a shame that Ginder didn't tell a better story because he has a nice sense of literary style. Unfortunately, he's fond of writing inane sentences like "Half of loving someone is being okay with hating her" in the apparent belief that readers will mistake nonsense for deep thought. His characters are constantly engaged in profoundly witty conversations that are neither profound nor witty. Did I believe that Clare rented a private booth in a porn arcade so that she could have "a private place to cry"? I did not. Did I believe that Finn and Randall brought a fifty-year-old cat along on their trip? No. The novel is littered with nonsense like this in a failed attempt to add heft or interest to an empty story. While some sections of Driver's Education provide momentary entertainment and would probably work well as short stories, the novel fails to come together as a convincing, meaningful whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED