Joe Meno. (2012). Office Girl: A Novel. Akashic Books.

Joe Meno. 2012. Office Girl: A Novel. Akashic Books.

Joe Meno, Office Girl: A Novel. Akashic Books, 2012.

Joe Meno. Office Girl: A Novel. Akashic Books, 2012.

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     Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is a winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and was a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of five novels and two short story collections including The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Demons in the Spring, and Hairstyles of the Damned. His short fiction has been published in One Story, McSweeney's, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and Chicago magazine. His stage plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Charville, France. He is an associate professor in the fiction writing department at Columbia College Chicago.
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Office Girl

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This quirky tale of two young artists in love in 1990s Chicago is “a gorgeous little indie romance . . . A sweetheart of a novel” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
In the last year of the twentieth century, Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who’s most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement, in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set just before the end of one world and the beginning of another, this is the story of two people trying to capture a moment in the face of an uncertain future.
 
Named a Best Book of the Year by Daily Candy and chosen as a favorite fiction work of the year in The Believer’s readers’ poll, Office Girl “reads as a parody of art-school types . . . and as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit” (The New York Times Book Review).
 
“Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . The story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Meno’s tender, hip, funny, and imaginative portrayal of two Chicago misfits . . . dramatizes that anguished and awkward passage between legal age and actual adulthood.” —Booklist
 
Features black-and-white illustrations by artist Cody Hudson and photographs by Todd Baxter.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content:

     "The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999...When things Get Weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Marie Claire
   • content: "Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It's 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was...well, you know. Meno's alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Tribune
   • content: "Odile and Jack are...two characters in search of authentic emotion...their pas de deux is...dynamic. Meno's plain style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Kansas City Star
   • content: "A beguiling and slyly disquieting storyteller, Meno forges surprising connections between deep emotion and edgy absurdity, self-conscious hipness and timeless metaphysics. In this geeky-elegant novel, Meno transforms wintery Chicago into a wondrous crystallization of countless dreams and tragedies, while telling the stories of two derailed young artists, two wounded souls, in cinematic vignettes that range from lushly atmospheric visions to crack-shot volleys of poignant and funny dialogue. With bicycles in the snow emblematic of both precariousness and determination, Meno's charming, melancholy, frank and droll love story wrapped around an art manifesto both celebrates those who question and protest the established order and contemplates the dilemmas that make family, creativity, ambition and love perpetually confounding and essential."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Sun-Times
   • content: "A wispy, bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter, not the sweet) romance, Office Girl is the story of Odile and Jack, a pair of alienated twentysomething bohemians whose artistic ambitions are being worn away by one soul-killing call-center job after another in Chicago."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Reader
   • content: "Office Girl is a bittersweet little love story framed by Bill Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial and the turn of the millennium...By letting his characters be emotionally vulnerable, even shallow or trite--which is to say...real--Meno supplies an off-kilter, slightly inappropriate answer to the Hollywood rom-com. Meno is a deft writer. The dialogue in Office Girl is often funny, the pacing quirky, and some of its quick, affecting similes remind me of Lorrie Moore."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Time Out Chicago
   • content: "Meno's books have become increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as if Meno has written the book he's been wanting to write for years, combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance, the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct prose cut into vignettes and montage. He also works with longtime collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody Hudson...Gorgeously packaged, it's like a Meno box set 15 years in the making."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Time Out New York
   • content: "It might be a standard boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It's 1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack's wife has recently left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing firm, they meet, and it isn't long before he is supporting her attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Stranger
   • content: "Office Girl might be Joe Meno's breakthrough novel. Set in 1999, Office Girl tells the story of a pair of young, intelligent drifters who decide to start their own art movement. It's a stripped-down experience of a novel which means Meno's crystalline prose has a chance to shine."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Philadelphia City Paper
    • content: "Office...
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 16, 2012
      In Joe Meno’s new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics (“It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone”). If the reader doesn’t recognize the territory being mined by the time Jack and Odile begin covering their neighborhood in cryptic graffiti credited “ALPHONSE F.” Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned) equips the book with two alternate titles—Bohemians and Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things—that ought to straighten things out. High on quirk and hipster cred, the novel is light as air, surprisingly unpretentious, and extremely kind to its larky, irony-addled protagonists. Meno is really the heir to Douglas Coupland, who introduced this crowd in 1991’s Generation X. However, Meno’s sympathy for his heroes’ frustrations makes his novel more than merely endearing. Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      June 1, 2012
      Sometimes things just don't work out, no matter how hard we wish they would. But there's irony, so we have that going for us. Right? The talented Chicago-based Meno (The Great Perhaps, 2009, etc.) has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999. The titular protagonist is Odile, the arty, brazen and fearless 23-year-old who loves graffiti, the Velvet Underground's "After Hours," riding her bicycle around the city, and the married guy she can't have. She's also chronically unemployable, generous to a fault and susceptible to dumb mistakes like offering a sexual favor to a co-worker who can't keep his mouth shut, forcing Odile to quit and go take a crap job in customer service. Jack is a few years older and a spiraling tragedy of his own making. An art school graduate with no creative traction, he's devastated by his abrupt divorce from Elise, to whom he was married less than a year. To fill his soul, Jack records things, and Meno turns these fleeting sounds into mini-portraits. "Everything is white and soft and dazzling," he writes. "And Jack, in front of his apartment building, can't help but stop and record as much of it as he can. Because it's a marvel, an explosion, a cyclone of white and silver flakes." The encounter between these two creative iconoclasts is less courting and more epiphany, as they discover the amazing and transformative effects of love with a joy as naive as that of children. Their story can be artificially cute, with secret messages scrawled on city walls and dirty magazines awash with surrealistic Polaroid snapshots. But when things Get Weird as things do when we're young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying the lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 1, 2012
      

      Meno's 2004 novel, Hairstyles of the Damned, retains a loyal cult following, but that won't happen with this Y2K-set book. If this is a send-up of romantic comedies, then Meno isn't doing enough subverting. He still intimately knows his milieu: young, disaffected white couples wrestling with work, love, and the uncaring urban landscape. The protagonists here are art school dropout Odile, who huffs Wite-Out at her many office jobs, and mopey graphic designer Jack, whose wife has just left him for Berlin. They begin an affair and a micro-art movement. Sort of. "Jack puts his hands on her breasts from behind, and she does not say anything or move his hands away, and almost by accident he murmurs, I love you, ' and she says, 'What?' and he says, 'Nothing. I just had to sneeze.'" Photographs by Todd Baxter and drawings by Cody Hudson are interspersed with mixed success. VERDICT Meno's descriptions of snow and Chicago's landscape can be lovely, even moving, but there's a problem when these passages are more compelling than the human characters and the plot.--Travis Fristoe, Alachua Cty. Lib. Dist., FL

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from May 15, 2012
      Most tales about fleeting yet indelible love affairs are set in summer. Meno's story of tenuous ardor between two artistic, ambivalent, and disaffected misfits takes place in winter in Chicago. We first meet Odile as she rides her bicycle through the snow. An art-school dropout, she has held 17 lousy jobs in three years and expresses her frustrations by drawing lewd graffiti with a silver marker. Skittish art-school graduate Jack is also adrift, riding his bike in the snow while carrying a small silver tape recorder to capture the stark or strange or sublime sounds of the city. The two meet while working in a Muzak sales office. It's 1999, the faltering end of a century of brutality and invention, and nothing seems anchored or meaningful. Bold and angry Odile starts a guerrilla art movement of two in favor of unimportant things, and sweet Jack reluctantly joins her in risky street performances. Flashbacks reveal the sources of Odile and Jack's wariness of romance and ambition. Following his encompassing drama of family and war, The Great Perhaps (2009), Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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This quirky tale of two young artists in love in 1990s Chicago is “a gorgeous little indie romance . . . A sweetheart of a novel” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
In the last year of the twentieth century, Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who’s most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement, in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set just before the end of one world and the beginning of another, this is the story of two people trying to capture a moment in the face of an uncertain future.
 
Named a Best Book of the Year by Daily Candy and chosen as a favorite fiction work of the year in The Believer’s readers’ poll, Office Girl “reads...

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