This is Julie Hecht’s first novel, after two collections of short stories “Happy Trails to You” and “Do the Windows Open?”. She first wrote for the New Yorker magazine, and “The Unprofessionals” fits their brand of fiction – quirky, sophisticated and unsentimental. I was reminded of Joan Didion’s “Play it as it Lays” when I read this book, except that Hecht has a lighter touch – you feel the characters’ distress but not acutely, since the writer presents her thoughts in a self-disparaging kind of way. The “unprofessionals” are the book’s narrator, a photographer in her 50’s, and her best friend, a young man of 21 who is like a soul mate to her. They both struggle to find meaning in their life but are so sensitive to inconsistencies and ugly surroundings in modern America that their only solace from it is to share their insights with each other on the details of meaninglessness or irony around us. Hecht is very good at finding things like that in our surroundings – she describes an all-night supermarket in L.A., but it could be the same store anywhere, with banal music piped in, and parking lot cleaning trucks being driven recklessly outside. But Hecht's narrator is not setting herself above us, since she can barely manage life’s details, and her friend doesn’t do much better by experimenting with drugs and ending up in rehab. When so many people are searching for balance through diet and meditation and pharmaceutical drugs, this is a book relevant to what ails us, although with no pointers to head us in a different direction.
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