A bas la différence!

Kathy Lette’s latest novel begins with a zany one-liner: ‘How can we win the sex war when we keep fraternising with the enemy?’ The next sentence is a zany one-liner: ‘God, apparently as a prank, devised two sexes and called them opposite.’ The third is also a zany one-liner, and the fourth and the fifth. Aaagh! Wacky one- liners choke the book, rendering the reader gasping for gravity. They elbow aside both plot and characterisation, which is just as well, because the plot is profoundly absurd and the characters are clichéd cartoon cut-outs.

Shelly, a schoolteacher, suddenly finds she is about to marry a total stranger, handsome American Kit, ‘butter-blond with a chiselled physique’. She had no idea that her pupils had put her name down for a reality television show, Desperate and Dateless. The prize is a wedding in Gretna Green. Shelly blithely gets married, has oral sex and flies off to the French-speaking island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean for the honeymoon, camera crew in tow.