We Can Still Be Friends

"Kelly Cherry brings an unerring ear and a poet’s sensibility to her difficult task: unraveling the tangle of emotions in our all-too-human hearts."—Lee Smith

"We Can Still Be Friends is Kelly Cherry at her best, which is to say it is a brilliant novel both furious and funny."—Robert Olen Butler

"Cherry’s novel is lyrical, offbeat and sexy."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ava has invested everything in her long-running affair with Tony, a handsome doctor from Chicago, though lately, things have not been quite right. Then Tony telephones Ava to tell her that yes, there is someone else, and that his new love, Claire, is the beautiful art-historian wife of a movie producer whom he had been seeing for two months. But, he assures Ava, of course, he cares for her, and they can still be friends.

Ava is furious. This was the relationship that was supposed to lead to marriage, or at least a child. She decides that she is owed a baby, and that she is going to collect, if not from Tony then from Claire’s husband, Boyd. By permitting Claire’s affair, he is to blame for Ava’s loss. And Ava flies out to Los Angeles to tell him so.

But what happens changes everything, for Ava, Tony, Claire and Boyd. This is a witty and whimsical take on the age old adage, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Kelly Cherry is the author of six works of fiction, as well as a memoir, essays, stories, nine volumes of poetry and two translations. She is Eudora Welty professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing. She now lives in Virginia with her husband.

What happens when the relationship ends? You even the score.

Publishers Weekly

Poet, translator and novelist Cherry (My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers) fashions a subtly sexy m nage quatre for the postfeminist set, chronicling the fallout of a shattered romance. Divorced heart surgeon Tony Ferro dumps his lover, eminent women's studies scholar Ava Martel, for blond art historian Claire Buchanan. Ava decides it's time to stop playing nice. She is tired of living in "the darkened halls of sadness" and she wants a baby: if Tony won't sire it, then she figures that Boyd Buchanan, Claire's uxorious movie-producer husband, owes her one. She travels halfway across the country to present her reasoned case to Buchanan, who agrees to impregnate Ava, more as a bulwark against mortality than to hurt his wife. The novel moves swiftly between Claire's sumptuous home in the L.A. canyons, Tony's Chicago condo and Boyd's sprawling Santa Fe ranch. Cherry exhaustively probes the characters' motivations and intentions, relating them from all four points of view. The plot and anguished tone bear some similarity to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, which provides the novel's epigraph. But with its blandly glamorous characters (the women are beautiful and hold Ph.D.s; Tony is a stud who is "bedded down by all the lovely women") and rather implausible dramatic turns, Cherry's work reads like a movie treatment. Appropriately enough, it's a guilty pleasure. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kelly Cherry is the author of six works of fiction, as well as a memoir, essays, stories, nine volumes of poetry and two translations. She is Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing. She now lives in Virginia with her husband.