The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner

I have enjoyed Weiner's novels for several years. However, this book of short stories was uneven and disappointing. The first three stories shared the same characters, which made me think that the book was going to be a set of vignettes about this family. However, the rest of the stories were about all different groups of people, including (indulgently) some characters from her other books.

Many stories shared a theme around swimming, or characters who swam, but other than that, I found no ideas or themes that were shared through the book. I admit that I am not always a fan of short stories, but I'll pick up a Hemingway or Munro book now and then and don't feel this way about those.

One story is about a woman who transforms her job helping kids write college essays into helping someone write a personal ad. That she misjudges one of the applicants (who ends up having a disabled brother) and falls in love with her "ad" client is reasonably predictable. The highlight of that story is her client's description of himself, "Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?"

In another story, she seems to struggle with ideas around teenage pregnancy and parenthood, and child abuse. It too is predictable. Like in the story described above, though, the writing is as good as the theme is boring:

"How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a Master's degree and a mortgage and a husband, who'd insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable, brat?"

The title story was about a woman whose interference with her ex-boyfriend's wedding registry actually changes history in a sci-fi Back-to-the-Future way. Kind of a cool idea, except in the afterward, she mentions that it is being developed into a movie script. How those thirteen pages can turn into an hour and a half worth $10.75 I'll look forward to seeing.

The one highlight of the book for me was the afterword, where she describes how each story came to her, and under what circumstances she wrote it. Like Suite Francaise, it was a neat opportunity to understand how writers think. She mentions in the afterword that the stories were told in the order of the characters' ages, which I did not notice but thought was cool.