Send & Receive
by Alissa Baxter
(Oshun)
The world of Alissa Baxter’s Send & Receive is one where girls get tipsy after two glasses of wine, where men are either good mates or scoundrels, and where the only black person in the novel speaks English with “a faint American accent”. There’s no shame in this. The novel is set in Durban, so — except for the fact that it takes two bottles of wine to even raise a sweat on your average Durban clubber — that’s probably a pretty good depiction of what it’s like in a certain sector of society.
And this isn’t meant to be realism, or at least not realism of the traditional kind. It’s what people are fond of referring to as chick lit, which I assume is a clever way of saying it’s not meant to be literature, and that it’s not for women who are hung up on considering themselves adults.
So it’s not serious literature, whatever that is, but it is a fun read if you’re into impossibly romantic situations featuring improbable, yet eerily compelling dialogue, and uncomplicated characters with utterly superficial problems. In fact, the very formula that makes sitcoms like Friends so wildly successful.
Let me quote the plot synopsis: “Struggling to choose between a hopeless crush on her gorgeous trust-fund manager and a blossoming cyber affair with an enigmatic writer, Angie turns to her zany new friends for advice on Love and Life. But what does SHE really want?”
It’s a thorny question, although a casual reader will soon see that what Angie really wants, despite her best efforts to hide this from herself, is a jolly good shag. This isn’t the central concern of the book, though. That is probably best defined as the glorification of romance, and much of the book is spent asserting the viability of the romance genre as a literary form.
Angie is a writer, who has submitted a novel to Mills & Boon, and your more discerning reader will detect a whiff of autobiography here. At one point, Angie pontificates on why people scorn romance novels: “I think that people are threatened at some subconscious level by romances”.
The path Angie takes to get to her own, inevitable happy ending, is a tortuous one, bedevilled with the kind of narrative complexities that fans of The Bold and the Beautiful will be familiar with. Strangely, the characters of Send & Receive, and the trite situations they find themselves in, have a haunting familiarity. I recognise them in people I know, which frankly doesn’t say much about the quality of my friends. I’m not going to be patronising and suggest what sort of reader will find this book appealing. Suffice to say, I think marketing mavens will be surprised at the reach of its potential audience.