Broken Pencil By Hal Niedzviecki I Smile Back Amy Koppelman (Two Dollar Radio, $15)

Laney, suburban mother, wife of a wildly successful insurance man with a best-selling book, is going crazy. Handfuls of Xanax, bottomless glasses of wine, wildly ill-advised random sex with strangers are symptoms of a deeper malaise-an inability to feel coupled with the constant pressure of feeling too much. New York writer Koppelman is great at evoking the polarized psychology of a woman pulled between conflicting desires. She forces us into the mental space of a woman we’re never allowed to quite like. Laney is no overwrought cliché abused or confused, or someone we eventually come to blankly sympathize with.
Laney is, rather, someone who can never quite belong, someone who has it all and can’t stand it, someone who knows one thing for sure: she’s her own worst enemy. Imagine, if you will, the uncompromising sexual prose of the great Tamara Faith Berger merging with an episode of Mad Men. In the end, it’s Koppelman’s prose that sustains this short novel. While others could have easily gone astray with a premise that’s as hackneyed as it is evocative, Koppelman shows restraint and nostalgic precision for a time that never was: “It is dark and there is quiet. Outside, angry suburban chimneys jab at a nearly perfect evening sky. Somewhere perhaps, a song is playing; a cruiser from their time, on of those great mix-tape-roll-down-you-window, cigarette-smoking tunes.” (Hal Niedzviecki)

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