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Summary
Summary
The battle of the sexes rages on in this smart, witty, and extremely timely new comedy by the phenomenally popular Jane Heller! This time she poses a provocative question: While it's common for deadbeat husbands to dodge their alimony payments by nefarious means, what happens when a woman plays by the same fast-and-loose rules?
Manhattan financial planner Melanie Banks likes being on top. She's addicted to the money, the power, and the success only hard work and long hours can bring. When she first meets and falls in love with pro football player Dan Swain, she admires his work ethic too. But then they get married and his career comes to a screeching halt, and suddenly she's the one bringing home the bacon--and falling out of love with him. In the years--years!--since he last held a job, he's become a paycheck-devouring, couch-sitting mooch, and he likes it that way. And Melanie decides it's time to lose the loser.
Divorce, however, isn't all it's cracked up to be. For starters, Melanie's forced to share custody of Buster, the couple's adorable dog. And married or not, she still has to support the incomeless Dan in the princely style to which he's become so infuriatingly accustomed. Whether the overpaid lawyers term it "alimony" or "maintenance," the bad news is that she has to pay it--and keep paying it until death do them part.
But there is one loophole.
If she can dump her ex on some other unsuspecting female for ninety days and get him to violate their cohabitation clause, she's off the hook--forever.
Sound tricky? Not for Melanie Banks. The first step is to secretly hire Desiree Klein, New York's premier professional matchmaker. It's not long before Desiree supplies Ms. Right (or at least Ms. Right-for-Ninety-Days) and Dan walks straight into the trap. Before Melanie knows it, her lazy ex has a new love, and by the end of the ninety days he'll be out of her life--and her checkbook. Revenge is going to be so sweet ...
Unless Melanie gets caught in a little loophole of her own creation.
Dan's fresh start has revitalized him. His new sweetheart is miraculously transforming him into a responsible, caring, focused go-getter. In other words, he's becoming precisely the man Melanie always dreamed he could be. And now she wants him back.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nowadays, a woman might bring home more bacon than the lazy pig she married does-an idea Heller (Best Enemies, etc.) runs with in her latest breezy, easy read. Melanie Banks, wedded to her job as a financial planner and freshly divorced from former football star Dan Swain, hates writing him that monthly alimony check, which he spends on Cristal and Gucci moccasins as he languishes in their fancy apartment, while she must settle for dingier digs. Since he's sworn off remarriage and a new career, nursing old injuries to his knee and his pride, Melanie's only out is a bit of legal fine print: if Dan shacks up with a woman for 90 days, he forfeits his right to Melanie's money. Her scheme to find him his ideal woman works all too well: Dan falls for a vixen veterinarian, invites her to move in and shapes up into the man who first stole Melanie's heart. Catastrophically obsessed with the new couple and hell-bent on winning Dan back, Melanie lets her work slide and deflects the advances of her heartthrob neighbor. Readers drawn to Heller's zippy style and culturally astute wit will forgive the ham-fisted plot, which rollicks toward a reassuringly happy ending. Agent, Ellen Levine. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
New Yorker Melanie Banks fears returning to the poverty of her childhood, and consequently has worked hard to become a top financial planner. An injury has ended her husband Dan's football career, and his failure to find a new career induces her to file for divorce, only to find out that she now has to support Dan in the style that she can afford. Her only hope is a clause in the settlement stipulating that if Dan cohabitates with someone for 90 days, her alimony stops. So she enlists the help of a matchmaker to surreptitiously find the perfect woman for her ex. Then the plan works too well. With the help of this new paragon, Dan turns into the man Melanie tried to mold him into, and now she wants him back. Heller explores the changing dynamics between men and women in our society with her usual wit and intelligence, drawing a funny and insightful picture of divorce and beyond when dreams are attained and lost. --Patty Engelmann Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
The author of, most recently, Best Enemies (2003), introduces the "bumbo." Melanie Banks is a successful financial planner living in Manhattan. When she married football hero Dan Swain, the two were perfectly matched, good-looking up-and-comers. Then he blew out his knee and turned into a "bumbo": a slacker who sponges off his hard-working wife. By the time their divorce is final, Melanie is glad to be rid of him, but she's not so glad about the alimony she'll be paying for years to come. When Melanie realizes that the payments stop if Dan cohabits with another woman for 90 days, she hires a matchmaker to lure her ex into new love. The plan succeeds a little too well. Not only does Dan fall head-over-heels for a gorgeous veterinarian, but this dream girl also inspires him to take a shower, put on a suit and find a job coaching football. Meeting the new-and-improved Dan, Melanie wants him back. Any woman who has dumped a loser only to see him become another woman's Prince Charming will feel a twinge of pathos here, but such sympathy will last only until she remembers that Melanie is the diabolical creator of this sorry situation. She engineered Dan's transformative romance with Machiavellian determination and, in the process, manipulated and lied to several people--including Dan. Melanie tries to explain why her love of lucre supercedes ethics or decency (her mother died when she was small; her father was a poor provider; she equates money with security), but this isn't enough to make her appealing. Heller may hope that the phenomenon of well-paid women supporting their less-successful exes will become talk-show fodder--indeed, the prologue features Melanie protesting that there really are a lot of women just like her--but Heller's story this time out doesn't succeed as entertainment. Unlikable heroine, mean-spirited plot. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Newly divorced, Melanie Banks is determined to put an end to the alimony she is forced to pay her unemployed ex-husband, a former pro football player who has done little since an injury sidelined him years ago. His embarrassing attempt at a broadcasting career went nowhere, and now he lives off Melanie in their old apartment. Since their divorce agreement allows alimony payments to be terminated if Dan lives with another woman for 90 days, Melanie decides to set Dan up secretly through a dating service. But when Dan falls for his match and begins to clean up his act, Melanie, predictably, begins to wonder if she has made a mistake. While this book has some funny moments, it is not as humorous as some of Heller's other novels (e.g., Sis Boom Bah or Name Dropping); it is hard not to wish that Melanie had kept her resolution not to become "one of those bitter divorc?es who can't go five minutes without bashing her ex." Most readers simply will not enjoy watching Melanie make a fool of herself and neglect everything and everyone else in her life. Still, fans of Heller will request it, and chick-lit readers may also enjoy.-Elizabeth M. Mellett, Brookline P.L., MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
An Ex to Grind A Novel Chapter One Let me begin with a few words of caution for women in their thirties and younger: if you think sexual equality is a nonissue, a relic from your mother's or grandmother's bra-burning past, a subject that's so yesterday, think again. The debate over it is back in a new and particularly insidious form, and I need to warn you about it. Please don't groan and say, "Sexual equality? She must be an alarmist." I know what I'm talking about. You see, this isn't about whether women can succeed in the workplace. That's a given. It's about whether our success has cost us; about whether the fact that we're running companies and winning Senate seats and performing delicate brain surgeries has made us vulnerable to men who will glom onto us for our bucks, not our boobs. I'll be specific. I was a thirty-four-year-old woman in the once-male-dominated field of financial planning, pulling in a high six figures as a vice president at the Manhattan-based investment firm of Pierce, Shelley and Steinberg. I was well regarded and well compensated, because I was good at helping my already wealthy clients become more wealthy. The sexual equality thing never crossed my mind. But then something snapped me out of my complacence. I began to notice that with women grabbing more and more of the big-ticket jobs, men were being relegated to the so-called pinkcollar ones. Suddenly, women were the doctors, the lawyers, and the college presidents, and men were the nurses, the paralegals, and the librarians. We were undergoing a seismic shift in our culture, and I realized there had to be a consequence. Well, there has been a consequence. Men, discouraged by our growing dominance, are starting to shrug their shoulders and drop out of the workforce altogether, leaving it to us to support them. Take a look around if you don't believe me. Ask your friends. It's happening, and it's throwing off the balance, impacting both the way we hook up and the way we break up. This still isn't hitting home for you? To be honest, it didn't hit home for me until it hit my home. In the early years of my thirteen-year marriage, my exhusband was the breadwinner. Then his career ended abruptly, and I became the breadwinner. At first I wasn't concerned about our change in roles. A study had just been released reporting that wives were outearning their spouses in over a third of households, so I knew I wasn't the only woman bringing home 3 the bacon. I accepted the fact that if you're the partner who's up, you should assume responsibility for the partner who's down, no matter which gender you are. But then my ex-husband's bout with unemployment became chronic, which is to say that he didn't lift a finger to find himself a new career. The marriage unraveled. We couldn't handle the role changes after all. But as distressing as that was, the divorce was worse. Why? Because I got stuck assuming responsibility for the partner who was down, ev en though we were no longer partners! I was forced not only to hand over a huge chunk of my assets to my ex but to pay him alimony too. "Maintenance" they call it in New York state. Whatever. We're talking about me having to write checks to the guy every month for eight years. I was a good and generous person who gave to numerous charities and never cheated anybody out of anything. But this? Well, I balked, to put it mildly. Maybe you're thinking that if we're the big achievers now, we should stop whining and just fork over the cash in the divorce. But here's the thing: when it's your turn, you won't want to fork over the cash any more than men did when they were hogging the power seat. Did I go to extremes in my effort to wriggle out of my legal obligation to my ex? Sure. Do I regret what I did to him? Deeply. But I was caught up in that nutty fantasy about men-that even as we're out there conquering the world, they're supposed to be the strong ones, capable of rescuing us, or, at the very least, providing for us. It's all so confusing, isn't it? Well, maybe this little story of mine will help sort things out. Or maybe it'll simply confirm that equality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholden. Sign here," said my d iv orce a ttorney, Robin Baylor, a fortysomething black woman with impeccable credentials. Harvard for her undergraduate degree. Yale for law school. Louis Licari for the auburn highlights that were expertly woven through her short, spiky hair. The two of us were sitting in her elegantly appointed, wood-paneled conference room at a table the length of a city block. She had just passed me the gazillionth document pertaining to Melanie Banks (me) vs. Dan Swain (my ex). "It's the last one," she announced. "Promise?" I said with pleading eyes as I glanced at the huge file she had on Dan and me. So much paper. Such a waste of trees. "Trust me, yours wasn't as complicated as some," she said, and she wasn't kidding. She'd handled my friend Karen's divorce, which became a truly unsavory affair after it was revealed that Karen's ex was not only an insider trader with the SEC breathing down his neck but also a bigamist with two families on opposite coasts. "You've waited out the year of legal separation, and now you're just signing the conversion documents. Once these are filed, you're divorced. Case closed." "Closed?" I said. "I wish. Thanks to this settlement, I'm tied to Dan for seven more years.Having to pay him while we were separated was no picnic, but having to write him checks for the next . . . Well, the whole thing makes me sick." An Ex to Grind A Novel . Copyright © by Jane Heller. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from An Ex to Grind by Jane Heller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
