Synopsis
A wildly original debut, Maynard & Jennica weaves together dozens of voices to give us an unforgettable love story, a hilarious urban comedy, a page-turning literary mystery, and a portrait of our times. Maynard Gogarty is a defeated musician, a reformed misanthrope who makes a hobby of surreptitiously filming the fashion faux pas of New York City commuters. On an uptown 6 train in the sweltering summer of 2000 he meets Jennica Green, a nostalgic Californian who calculates that she s been lonesome 68.53 percent of her adult life. Though their initial acquaintance is fleeting, when fate next brings them together, at a screening of Maynard s film, romance intrudes. And as with most things in life, everyone has an opinion.
In the case of Maynard & Jennica, everyone includes many living and some dead relatives, a sultry scam artist who may or may not be Russian or Israeli or German, a hip-hop impresario named Puppy Jones, several dubious lawyers, a long-lost best friend, and a freelance contributor to The New Yorker. Exuberantly illuminating much that is telling (and often horrifying) about our times, fast-paced, and wryly funny, Maynard & Jennica introduces an astonishing number of narrators -- thirty-five in all -- while remaining true to the relationships at its heart. The result is an uproarious and deeply moving tour de force. Delson has given us a pair of lovers who are flawed, complex, at once eccentric and deeply familiar -- and in whose story we continue to feel invested long after we have turned the last page.
The New York Times - Thomas Beller
…this novel is made up of characters speaking at us as though to a camera crew that's been following them around for months. Maynard & Jennica feels like the first reality-television novel. Let me add that I don't mean this as an insult—Rudolph Delson has used the form to unspool a tightly plotted and genuinely original book…By the end…I was wallowing in a state of pleasure but also suspicion—suspicious because much of the novel is just so damn cute. But looking through its pages again I found one tiny comic gem after another, one pitch-perfect rendering of the modern moment after another. Delson brings a Nicholson Baker-like degree of precision to his descriptions; the book is always alive. I felt the odd elation that occurs when you read fiction that not only confirms your sense of the modern world but enlarges it, even if in a slightly precious way, and makes you laugh. That was my experience of Maynard & Jennica.