What do you do when you discover your spouse has an insignificant other?
How about when you realize your own insignificant other is becoming more significant than your spouse?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but Stephen McCauley—"the master of the modern comedy of manners" ( USA Today )—makes exploring them a literary delight.
Richard Rossi works in HR at a touchy-feely software company and prides himself on his understanding of the foibles and fictions we all use to get through the day. Too bad he’s not as good at spotting such behavior in himself.
What else could explain his passionate affair with Benjamin, a very unavailable married man? Richard suggests birthday presents for Benjamin’s wife and vacation plans for his kids, meets him for "lunch" at a sublet apartment, and would never think about calling him after business hours.
"In the three years I’d known Benjamin, I’d come to think of him as my husband . He was, after all, a husband, and I saw it as my responsibility to protect his marriage from a barrage of outside threats and bad influences. It was the only way I could justify sleeping with him."
Since Richard is not entirely available himself—there’s Conrad, his adorable if maddening partner to contend with—it all seems perfect. But when cosmopolitan Conrad starts spending a suspicious amount of time in Ohio, and economic uncertainty challenges Richard’s chances for promotion, he realizes his priorities might be a little skewed.
With a cast of sharply drawn friends, frenemies, colleagues, and personal trainers, Insignificant Others is classic McCauley—a hilarious and ultimately haunting social satire about life in the United States at the bitter end of the boom years, when clinging to significant people and pursuits has never been more important—if only one could figure out what they are.
Winter in Boston sets the mood for Richard Rossi's reflections. Once a psychologist, now working in HR for a high-tech company, he is often bemused by corporate nuances. His relationship with live-in lover Conrad has reached a level of mundane confusion, and the spice that “insignificant other” Benjamin provides now has less savor. What to do? Richard is an exercise junkie, performing two sessions a day, one in a sunny upscale gym, the other in a basementlike facility. The fact that Richard is on a quest for a more meaningful life is apparent to us, but not him, so he is astonished to find that his conversations at work and with friends and family have a new, more substantive feel and are having a greater effect than any of his therapy sessions. McCauley's turns of phrase give Richard's jaded, ironic, and terse observations a magnificently elitist snarkiness, and as amusing as the story is, readers will truly care about Richard's fate. --Danise Hoover
Review
“A master of the comic novel, Stephen McCauley makes someone else’s difficult, complicated relationship so witty, sexy and delightfully engrossing that you’ll forget about your own difficult, complicated relationship. Unsentimental but moving, Insignificant Others is the story of two men trying to solve the world’s oldest math problem: Does one plus one equal a couple, or just two?”
—Bob Smith, author of Selfish and Perverse and Openly Bob
“ Insignificant Others is vintage McCauley, offering up the usual mixture of hilarity, pathos, irony, and regret. You’ll root for Richard Rossi, the self deprecating and cannily observant HR functionary at Connectrix as he connects (or not) with co-workers and calibrates degrees of significance (or non) between lovers. It’s The Office meets Jane Austen, with a twist. I adored this novel.”
—Mameve Medwed, author of Mail and How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life
“ Alternatives to Sex is a bravura performance, chockablock with well-chosen words, sweeping psychological insights no truer than they should be, and characters who just might fulfill their desires for lodging and love.”
—WashingtonPost
“Funny and affecting...[ Alternatives to Sex ] offers a series of lively and trenchant character portraits and a shrewd appealing commentary on contemporary manners and morals.”
— People (Critics Choice)
“[McCauley’s] characters are complex and charismatic, his dialogue is winning, and consistently he plumbs the intersection of love and desire—always with brio and good cheer. He is reminiscent in that regard of Elinor Lipman and Nick Hornby.”
— The Boston Globe
“Stephen McCauley is a social satirist in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde…with fierce, occasionally lacerating wit and a commendable willingness to dally in ambivalence and moral ambiguity."
— Los AngelesTimes
“Like the Victorian novels admired by McCauley’s narrator, Insignificant Others is fuelled by curiosity about the way we live now—our deceptions and self-deceptions, our great yearnings and small vanities, our many excruciating social miscues and misfires. It is an incisive, rueful, humane, very smart, and very funny book.”
—Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index
“Reading Insignificant Others is like being a guest at the best kind of dinner party—every morsel is delicious, every guest is fascinating, and best of all you are in the company of the utterly irresistible Richard, who has strong opinions and deep insights about almost everyone, except perhaps himself. Even as I devoured this book I was deeply sorry to reach the end. Happily, I can go right back to read it again and again.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and The House on Fortune Street
About the Author
Stephen McCauley is the author of Alternatives to Sex, True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, and The Object of My Affection. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit his website at www.stephenmccauley.com.
When I learned that Conrad, my partner of eight years, was seeing someone on the side, I wasn’t completely surprised. A couple of years earlier, I’d noticed that the word “monogamy” had fallen out of our vocabulary, and I assumed he had as many reasons for no longer using it as I did. Even though it’s usually not acknowledged, at a certain point in most relationships discretion supplants fidelity as a guiding virtue.
The slow, silent fade of monogamy in our lives reminded me of something that had happened with a particularly flavorful baked chicken dish we used to make. The chicken was spiced with cumin and ground caraway seeds, preserved lemons, and a handful of musky herbs I’d picked up at a Lebanese grocery store. It filled the entire apartment with a smell that was both exotic and homey, and it came out of the oven glistening, looking nourishing and vaguely pornographic. Conrad and I both liked it a lot—after the third or fourth year of cohabitation, it was among the few things we agreed upon wholeheartedly—and he or I ended up cooking it a couple of times a month. I took a great deal of comfort and delight in sitting across the table from him and talking in bland terms, like a long-married and slightly bored couple, about the honest pleasures of the meal. Then one day, I was rummaging around in the kitchen cabinets and came across the ground caraway seeds and realized that without discussing it or consciously crossing it off a list, we hadn’t served it in over a year. I suppose both of us just got tired of the wonderful flavor. It happens.
While we’d stopped using the word “monogamy,” significantly, we hadn’t stopped using words of affection and fondness. We hadn’t stopped saying “I love you” at the end of long-distance phone calls or when one of us was half asleep and wanted to signal the other to turn out the lights. Surely, those were the more important points. Conrad frequently traveled for work, and when business was good, he sometimes spent ten or more days a month out of town. How could I have been surprised that he had an Insignificant Other as a source of entertainment? There are only so many ways to amuse yourself in a hotel room, and Conrad had never been a big one for CNN.
It was my own fault I learned about the I.O. Conrad had been striving for discretion. I was dashing around our bedroom stuffing my clothes into a backpack on a winter night, running late for an exercise class at one of the gyms I belong to, when I heard the buzzing of his cell phone. I was so shocked to realize it was on the bureau and not with him as it always seemed to be, and so distracted by my own uncharacteristic tardiness, I picked it up. There was a text message on the screen from an Ohio area code that read: Can’t fucking WAIT for you to get here. Conrad was leaving for Columbus in two days.
Conrad Mitchell and his friend Doreen McAllister ran Mitchell and McAllister, a consulting business. They traveled to cities all over the country where there was lots of new money and an attendant lack of taste—they practically lived in Florida and Texas—and advised people building multimillion-dollar houses on the artwork they should hang on their expensive walls. I could understand a client being excited about acquiring a Warhol, but the caps, even more than the “fucking,” were a dead giveaway that the message was about something else.
Because he traveled so much, and because he was a highly organized and precise person, Conrad kept a small suitcase packed with toiletries, handkerchiefs, and clean underwear in the closet. It was an expensive black leather item capable of consuming vast quantities of clothes and supplies without ever appearing bloated. It was aging well, too—in any case, better than I was. From where I stood at the bureau in our small bedroom, I could see the suitcase leaning against the paper-bag-colored wall. (Conrad had chosen a hypermasculine decor and color scheme for the bedroom, an example of protesting too much, I’d always thought.) Suddenly, the black valise had a malevolent appearance, like a slim priest who was hiding explosives under his cassock.
Conrad was at the dining room table organizing a portfolio by slipping photographs of paintings and expensive sculptures into plastic covers, his lank and pretty blond hair hanging across his face. I left the apartment without mentioning the text message, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell I’d seen it. I wasn’t eager to admit I’d looked at his phone, and more to the point, I didn’t want to open up a discussion that would make me late for class. After decades of perpetually running behind schedule by eight or ten minutes, I’d reset my inner clock a few years earlier and was now fanatically punctual. Being prompt is one of those lesser qualities—like sending thank-you notes, wearing deodorant, and tipping the mailman at Christmas—that you can will into being with a little discipline. They don’t rank up there with Talent, Intelligence, and Goodness, but past the age of fifty, they become essential if you want to get invited to dinner parties or have your sagging jowls overlooked.
No matter what, I was never late for exercise class. For about four years, I’d been struggling with a minor compulsion related to working out. At times it was a heavy burden, but it did have its advantages. Sneaking off to the gym six or more times a week to lift weights, take spinning classes, and listen to my personal trainer’s relationship problems took up a lot of time I could have spent studying a language or reading George Eliot, but on the plus side, even at my fifty-something stage of life, I never had to worry about all the time it otherwise would have taken me to get back in shape.
The gym I belonged to near the Beacon Hill condo Conrad and I shared—versus the one I belonged to near my office in Cambridge—was a grimy basement, and the spinning classes were held in a corner room without light or ventilation. I appreciated the darkness and the privacy it conferred. The only people who crow about spending as much time as I do exercising are the ones who never get off the couch. Those of us who can’t stop ourselves tend to exercise furtively and try to pass off our lean bodies as the product of genetics. As I pedaled in the dark, getting nowhere, trying to tune out the shrill voice of the instructor and the thumping music that I liked to pretend I was speeding away from, I reasoned that I had little to worry about. Conrad’s eager friend lived in Columbus. I’d been to Columbus a number of times and had nothing against the city, but knowing Conrad’s limpid snobbery, I knew someone from there was not a threat the way a paramour from New York or Los Angeles would have been.
Description:
What do you do when you discover your spouse has an insignificant other?
How about when you realize your own insignificant other is becoming more significant than your spouse?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but Stephen McCauley—"the master of the modern comedy of manners" ( USA Today )—makes exploring them a literary delight.
Richard Rossi works in HR at a touchy-feely software company and prides himself on his understanding of the foibles and fictions we all use to get through the day. Too bad he’s not as good at spotting such behavior in himself.
What else could explain his passionate affair with Benjamin, a very unavailable married man? Richard suggests birthday presents for Benjamin’s wife and vacation plans for his kids, meets him for "lunch" at a sublet apartment, and would never think about calling him after business hours.
"In the three years I’d known Benjamin, I’d come to think of him as my husband . He was, after all, a husband, and I saw it as my responsibility to protect his marriage from a barrage of outside threats and bad influences. It was the only way I could justify sleeping with him."
Since Richard is not entirely available himself—there’s Conrad, his adorable if maddening partner to contend with—it all seems perfect. But when cosmopolitan Conrad starts spending a suspicious amount of time in Ohio, and economic uncertainty challenges Richard’s chances for promotion, he realizes his priorities might be a little skewed.
With a cast of sharply drawn friends, frenemies, colleagues, and personal trainers, Insignificant Others is classic McCauley—a hilarious and ultimately haunting social satire about life in the United States at the bitter end of the boom years, when clinging to significant people and pursuits has never been more important—if only one could figure out what they are.
From Publishers Weekly
Narrator Richard and his partner, Conrad, are a well-adjusted gay couple living in Boston at the end of the American Century in McCauley's adroit latest (after Alternatives to Sex ). They have an understanding that allows for the occasional infidelity, but when Richard realizes that Conrad's current fling may be luring him away, he begins to worry. It doesn't help that Richard is becoming infatuated with his own insignificant other, Benjamin, who leads a double life as a supposedly happily married father of two. Richard's problems, though, go well beyond his love life, and with a dry, caustic wit and the occasionally weighty social observation, he describes how he's coping with his own exercise addiction, his suspicious sister, a client at work who may or may not be on the brink of going crazy, a friend who can't bring himself to tell his wife about his health problems, and his deeply confused feelings about Conrad and Benjamin. But it's an unlikely alliance with Conrad's business partner and the slow unraveling of his problems that adds an unexpectedly and refreshingly sentimental dimension to this accomplished comedy. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Winter in Boston sets the mood for Richard Rossi's reflections. Once a psychologist, now working in HR for a high-tech company, he is often bemused by corporate nuances. His relationship with live-in lover Conrad has reached a level of mundane confusion, and the spice that “insignificant other” Benjamin provides now has less savor. What to do? Richard is an exercise junkie, performing two sessions a day, one in a sunny upscale gym, the other in a basementlike facility. The fact that Richard is on a quest for a more meaningful life is apparent to us, but not him, so he is astonished to find that his conversations at work and with friends and family have a new, more substantive feel and are having a greater effect than any of his therapy sessions. McCauley's turns of phrase give Richard's jaded, ironic, and terse observations a magnificently elitist snarkiness, and as amusing as the story is, readers will truly care about Richard's fate. --Danise Hoover
Review
“A master of the comic novel, Stephen McCauley makes someone else’s difficult, complicated relationship so witty, sexy and delightfully engrossing that you’ll forget about your own difficult, complicated relationship. Unsentimental but moving, Insignificant Others is the story of two men trying to solve the world’s oldest math problem: Does one plus one equal a couple, or just two?”
—Bob Smith, author of Selfish and Perverse and Openly Bob
“ Insignificant Others is vintage McCauley, offering up the usual mixture of hilarity, pathos, irony, and regret. You’ll root for Richard Rossi, the self deprecating and cannily observant HR functionary at Connectrix as he connects (or not) with co-workers and calibrates degrees of significance (or non) between lovers. It’s The Office meets Jane Austen, with a twist. I adored this novel.”
—Mameve Medwed, author of Mail and How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life
“ Alternatives to Sex is a bravura performance, chockablock with well-chosen words, sweeping psychological insights no truer than they should be, and characters who just might fulfill their desires for lodging and love.”
—Washington Post
“Funny and affecting...[ Alternatives to Sex ] offers a series of lively and trenchant character portraits and a shrewd appealing commentary on contemporary manners and morals.”
— People (Critics Choice)
“[McCauley’s] characters are complex and charismatic, his dialogue is winning, and consistently he plumbs the intersection of love and desire—always with brio and good cheer. He is reminiscent in that regard of Elinor Lipman and Nick Hornby.”
— The Boston Globe
“Stephen McCauley is a social satirist in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde…with fierce, occasionally lacerating wit and a commendable willingness to dally in ambivalence and moral ambiguity."
— Los Angeles Times
“Like the Victorian novels admired by McCauley’s narrator, Insignificant Others is fuelled by curiosity about the way we live now—our deceptions and self-deceptions, our great yearnings and small vanities, our many excruciating social miscues and misfires. It is an incisive, rueful, humane, very smart, and very funny book.”
—Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index
“Reading Insignificant Others is like being a guest at the best kind of dinner party—every morsel is delicious, every guest is fascinating, and best of all you are in the company of the utterly irresistible Richard, who has strong opinions and deep insights about almost everyone, except perhaps himself. Even as I devoured this book I was deeply sorry to reach the end. Happily, I can go right back to read it again and again.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and The House on Fortune Street
About the Author
Stephen McCauley is the author of Alternatives to Sex, True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, and The Object of My Affection. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit his website at www.stephenmccauley.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Dinner and Monogamy
When I learned that Conrad, my partner of eight years, was seeing someone on the side, I wasn’t completely surprised. A couple of years earlier, I’d noticed that the word “monogamy” had fallen out of our vocabulary, and I assumed he had as many reasons for no longer using it as I did. Even though it’s usually not acknowledged, at a certain point in most relationships discretion supplants fidelity as a guiding virtue.
The slow, silent fade of monogamy in our lives reminded me of something that had happened with a particularly flavorful baked chicken dish we used to make. The chicken was spiced with cumin and ground caraway seeds, preserved lemons, and a handful of musky herbs I’d picked up at a Lebanese grocery store. It filled the entire apartment with a smell that was both exotic and homey, and it came out of the oven glistening, looking nourishing and vaguely pornographic. Conrad and I both liked it a lot—after the third or fourth year of cohabitation, it was among the few things we agreed upon wholeheartedly—and he or I ended up cooking it a couple of times a month. I took a great deal of comfort and delight in sitting across the table from him and talking in bland terms, like a long-married and slightly bored couple, about the honest pleasures of the meal. Then one day, I was rummaging around in the kitchen cabinets and came across the ground caraway seeds and realized that without discussing it or consciously crossing it off a list, we hadn’t served it in over a year. I suppose both of us just got tired of the wonderful flavor. It happens.
While we’d stopped using the word “monogamy,” significantly, we hadn’t stopped using words of affection and fondness. We hadn’t stopped saying “I love you” at the end of long-distance phone calls or when one of us was half asleep and wanted to signal the other to turn out the lights. Surely, those were the more important points. Conrad frequently traveled for work, and when business was good, he sometimes spent ten or more days a month out of town. How could I have been surprised that he had an Insignificant Other as a source of entertainment? There are only so many ways to amuse yourself in a hotel room, and Conrad had never been a big one for CNN.
It was my own fault I learned about the I.O. Conrad had been striving for discretion. I was dashing around our bedroom stuffing my clothes into a backpack on a winter night, running late for an exercise class at one of the gyms I belong to, when I heard the buzzing of his cell phone. I was so shocked to realize it was on the bureau and not with him as it always seemed to be, and so distracted by my own uncharacteristic tardiness, I picked it up. There was a text message on the screen from an Ohio area code that read: Can’t fucking WAIT for you to get here. Conrad was leaving for Columbus in two days.
Conrad Mitchell and his friend Doreen McAllister ran Mitchell and McAllister, a consulting business. They traveled to cities all over the country where there was lots of new money and an attendant lack of taste—they practically lived in Florida and Texas—and advised people building multimillion-dollar houses on the artwork they should hang on their expensive walls. I could understand a client being excited about acquiring a Warhol, but the caps, even more than the “fucking,” were a dead giveaway that the message was about something else.
Because he traveled so much, and because he was a highly organized and precise person, Conrad kept a small suitcase packed with toiletries, handkerchiefs, and clean underwear in the closet. It was an expensive black leather item capable of consuming vast quantities of clothes and supplies without ever appearing bloated. It was aging well, too—in any case, better than I was. From where I stood at the bureau in our small bedroom, I could see the suitcase leaning against the paper-bag-colored wall. (Conrad had chosen a hypermasculine decor and color scheme for the bedroom, an example of protesting too much, I’d always thought.) Suddenly, the black valise had a malevolent appearance, like a slim priest who was hiding explosives under his cassock.
Conrad was at the dining room table organizing a portfolio by slipping photographs of paintings and expensive sculptures into plastic covers, his lank and pretty blond hair hanging across his face. I left the apartment without mentioning the text message, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell I’d seen it. I wasn’t eager to admit I’d looked at his phone, and more to the point, I didn’t want to open up a discussion that would make me late for class. After decades of perpetually running behind schedule by eight or ten minutes, I’d reset my inner clock a few years earlier and was now fanatically punctual. Being prompt is one of those lesser qualities—like sending thank-you notes, wearing deodorant, and tipping the mailman at Christmas—that you can will into being with a little discipline. They don’t rank up there with Talent, Intelligence, and Goodness, but past the age of fifty, they become essential if you want to get invited to dinner parties or have your sagging jowls overlooked.
No matter what, I was never late for exercise class. For about four years, I’d been struggling with a minor compulsion related to working out. At times it was a heavy burden, but it did have its advantages. Sneaking off to the gym six or more times a week to lift weights, take spinning classes, and listen to my personal trainer’s relationship problems took up a lot of time I could have spent studying a language or reading George Eliot, but on the plus side, even at my fifty-something stage of life, I never had to worry about all the time it otherwise would have taken me to get back in shape.
The gym I belonged to near the Beacon Hill condo Conrad and I shared—versus the one I belonged to near my office in Cambridge—was a grimy basement, and the spinning classes were held in a corner room without light or ventilation. I appreciated the darkness and the privacy it conferred. The only people who crow about spending as much time as I do exercising are the ones who never get off the couch. Those of us who can’t stop ourselves tend to exercise furtively and try to pass off our lean bodies as the product of genetics. As I pedaled in the dark, getting nowhere, trying to tune out the shrill voice of the instructor and the thumping music that I liked to pretend I was speeding away from, I reasoned that I had little to worry about. Conrad’s eager friend lived in Columbus. I’d been to Columbus a number of times and had nothing against the city, but knowing Conrad’s limpid snobbery, I knew someone from there was not a threat the way a paramour from New York or Los Angeles would have been.