Product Description

Mark thinks he has found The One in college. When Raquel abruptly takes off for Los Angeles to become a rock star, Mark tries to be happy for her–until ROCK-L’s first single sweeps the airwaves–a song about Mark’s stamina entitled “Two Minute Man.” And Mark’s life is never the same again.

Philippa doesn’t really think twice about cheating on her punk rocker boyfriend, Trevor. After all, she’s going to break up with him anyway. He mooches off her, treats her badly, and writes stupid songs about her breasts. Then Trevor’s band makes a splash with its one and only song sensation, “Philippa Cheats.” And suddenly Philippa is the most infamous ex-girlfriend in all of London.

Thus Philippa and Mark find themselves adrift, both single and living in Boston, still reeling from the impact that three minutes of music had on their lives. When these two minor-key souls meet and form a major chord, they will have to overcome the sneaking suspicion that each will betray the other . . . possibly with a song.

“Brendan Halpin adds weight to his funny moments and lightness to his sad ones . . . [reminding] us that comedy and tragedy aren’t opposites at all.”
–Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel, on Donorboy

“The author’s greatest gift: his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue.”
–People, on Long Way Back

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1471931 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-13
• Released on: 2007-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Vindictive songs change the course of two people's lives in Halpin's third novel (after Long Way Back), a funny and unlikely story about mending broken hearts. Philippa Strange, a fresh-out-of-high-school punk rock girl, divides her time between an alcoholic mother in Cincinnati and a rocker boyfriend in London and becomes unfortunately notorious after her boyfriend immortalizes her cheating ways—and her name—in a popular song. Meanwhile, shortly after Mark Norris finishes college in Philadelphia, he finds himself the victim of "premature ejaculation libel" when his ex-girlfriend cracks the Top 40 with her hit song, "Two Minute Man." Mark stumbles his way though toxic relationships as a pregnant Philippa, back in the States for good, fakes her death and assumes a new identity to escape from a violent boyfriend. Oddly, Mark's bumbling early adulthood is more engaging to read about than Philippa's flight, and though it's a given that the two will end up together, Halpin's assured prose and knack for mischievously comic turns ensure a smooth ride into happily ever after. (Mar. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In alternating chapters, Halpin (Long Way Back, 2006) details dual stories covering 20 years in the lives of punk-rock-loving Philippa and sensitive Mark. When Philippa's London musician boyfriend catches her cheating, he immortalizes the incident in a wildly popular song that sends her scurrying back to Cincinnati. Meanwhile, Mark meets brooding bisexual Raquel, who takes off for L.A. after college and humiliates him with her chart-topping "Two-Minute Man." Things continue to spiral downward for both as Philippa becomes pregnant by an abusive lover and completely cuts off contact with her family and friends, changing her identity and moving to Boston, while Mark, who has become an elementary-school teacher, is dumped by his corporate lawyer fiancee. Halpin's story sometimes feels too superficial because of the time compression. But when he is at his best--his tenderhearted depictions of Mark's loneliness and inept romantic relationships and of the fraught but loving bond between Philippa and her strong-willed daughter--he proves himself to be an insightful observer of contemporary relationships. A funny and touching, if somewhat predictable, tribute to the brokenhearted. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PHILIPPA

1983

She’s wearing a white T-shirt with the artwork from the first Clash album on it. The sleeves are cut off. She drinks a St. Pauli Girl dark and sits on the hood of Brad Worthington’s Camaro. She watches as a circle of stoners, fellow members of the Walnut Prep class of 1983, the last class to enter high school in the 1970s, pass a bong around, shed an occasional tear, and sing along with the words they can understand from Yes’s “Starship Trooper,” which is blaring from inside of Bobby Shiffer’s house.

She hates Yes, but she finds that she has kind of warmed to her Yes-listening classmates in the last few months. There are, after all, only fifty of them here at Walnut Prep, and they’ve been together since the first grade, and the fact that they are not as cool as she is no longer seems like a reason to openly scorn them. In fact, Philippa finds as she looks down into the grass at her stoned classmates that she feels real tenderness for them simply because she remembers them all as little kids, and because she’s never going to see them again after tonight and they are the only people who knew her before her parents split, before Mom started drinking, before she became the punk rock chick, back when she was just that little girl who really liked H. R. Pufnstuf.

She opens the graduation program again and runs down the list of the names of her classmates and where they are going for college. She doesn’t know if Denison University is a stoner school already, but it certainly looks like it will be next year. She finds her own name: “Philippa Jane Strange: London Academy of Music.” She smiles to herself, unable to believe she got away with this.

It’s her little private joke to herself, because what she’s going to do next year is what she’s done every summer since the seventh grade: go live at her dad’s flat in London and go to clubs and hear punk rock.

It’s one in the afternoon. Philippa staggers down to the kitchen of her dad’s flat, turns on the electric kettle, puts a PG Tips tea bag into a cup, and sits down at the table. She’s only mildly hungover. Dad, as he does whenever he spends the night here and not at Ella’s, has left Philippa this morning’s Telegraph, Times, and Guardian on the table. Once the kettle whistles, Philippa pours the hot water out and sits down to read the Telegraph. From there she’ll move to The Times, and finish up with The Guardian. She and her dad have a joke about how she reads from right to left. Dad does the opposite, but with the same impulse: begin with the one you disagree with the most and work your way over to your side to see what the real story is.

Philippa’s continued presence in her dad’s flat is a rebuke to both of their political convictions. Philippa, like her friends, fumes with outrage over what the Thatcher government is doing to the welfare state. Unlike her friends, she lives for free in a very smart flat and has food and booze money supplied to her by Simon Strange, an investment banker who belongs to the class of people that benefit most from the economic policies of the Tory government.

Simon, like his friends and co-workers, yearns for the dismantling of the welfare state, for a more Americanized system where the government doesn’t act as nanny and people are forced to show a little personal responsibility. Unlike his friends and co-workers, Simon runs a little mini welfare state of his own, with an endless reservoir of guilt over the divorce and his subsequent return to the UK fueling a micro-economy that would disgust him on a macro scale: Philippa pays no rent, is not expected to work, and drinks up her spending money.

Philippa is oblivious to any political irony in her situation, but Simon is not, principally because Ella points it out to him on a daily basis. Philippa’s causing a terrible strain on Simon’s relationship with Ella, but she’s oblivious to this, too.

She does, however, notice that the date on all the papers is October 1. At this point, she realizes, all of her classmates from Walnut Prep, even the ones who went to school in California, are in their little college dorms, happily marching on the treadmill that will lead them back to their dads’ companies, where they will be groomed to take over once they’ve gotten that BA under their belts. She feels superior to them, of course, but also, for the first time ever, a bit lost.

She’s never been in London this late in the year. It’s starting to get cool and rainy, and it’s already getting dark much earlier, so that heady feeling of emerging from the pub two pints into a good booze-up at nine p.m. with the sun shining down is gone at least until next summer.

And she’s starting to feel jaded about the music scene. The Clash are opening for the Who on a stadium tour of the US, for God’s sake, and she remembers being thirteen and packing into a sweaty club to see them and hearing “White Riot” for the first time and having her life changed as a result, and nothing currently happening in the clubs can touch anything that happened then.

This is even true of Trevor’s band, the NHS. (It stands for the National Hate Service, and is supposed to serve as some kind of political commentary on the Tories’ attack on the National Health Service, but Trevor reads three fewer newspapers every day than Philippa does and writes songs principally about booze and sex.) Philippa loves watching them perform, because Trevor is so very sexy when he sings, and she likes watching his hands on the guitar and remembering them on her the night before, imagining them on her after the show.

But she’s been with Trevor for nearly three months now, and the fog of infatuation is lifting, and she is forced to admit that the NHS is not the Clash.

The phone rings twice in quick succession, and Philippa feels annoyed. Annoyed because she prefers the one long ring of US phones to the chirpy, insistent two-ring alert of British phones, annoyed because she’s only halfway through The Times, and she really likes to read all three papers before speaking to anyone, and most of all annoyed because she thinks it’s Trevor calling.

Trevor is terrible on the phone, inarticulate and clumsy, and his matter-of-fact proclamations of lust—“Thinkin’ about your knickers today, Phil”—that actually seemed hot at first are now just kind of annoying. (She does enjoy the fact that the NHS’s latest single is called “Thinkin’ About Your Knickers,” though.) Also, he’s started stressing his poverty more and more recently (“I’m totally skint, Phil, buy us a pint”), and she’s beginning to suspect that he likes Simon’s money a lot more than her tits, which are another frequent topic of conversation.

So the phone trills—Ringring! . . . Ringring!—and it just won’t stop, and she doesn’t want to answer it, but she can’t very well read The Times with that business going on, and she figures she’ll have to talk to Trevor at some point today, so she may as well get it over with. She picks up the phone with her best punk rock attitude: “Yeah?”

“Uh, hello?” It’s a woman. Not Trevor. Not Ella calling to tell her to get a fucking job, either. This is not a fear on Philippa’s radar at the moment, though it’s a conversation that Ella is currently planning. No, it’s an American woman. But it’s not Mom.

“Yeah?” Philippa says with more annoyance.

“Um, Philippa?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s your aunt Betsy, honey. There’s . . . ,” and Aunt Betsy starts to cry. Philippa knows that nobody cries on a transatlantic phone call if it’s good news, and she knows Betsy wouldn’t spend the money on the phone call just to talk to her, and she knows she should be alarmed, or worried, or something, but she searches herself and finds nothing. She does manage to de-snottify her voice, though.

“What is it, B? What’s wrong?”

“It’s your mom, sweetie, she’s . . . there’s been an accident.”

Is she dead? Do you mean she’s dead, Aunt B? Say what you mean, dammit! Philippa’s relieved to find that she cares about the answer to this question.

“Is she okay?”

“She . . . her leg is badly fractured in three places, and the steering wheel knocked her two front teeth out, and she’s bruised all over, but she . . .” More crying. “I’m sorry, sweetie. She’s going to walk again, they say they can fix her face, and she’s not in a coma or anything, but she’s pretty loopy on the pain medication right now.”

“Jesus.” If she’s not dead, I’m not flying to Cincinnati, Philippa thinks. She sends her aunt telepathic messages: Don’t ask me to come back, because then I’ll have to say no, and then I’ll be a bad daughter, but I don’t want to come to Cincinnati, so if you just don’t ask, we’ll be fine.

“She . . . she was drinking, honey.” Well, duh, Philippa wants to say. I’m guessing it was a one-car accident, too. “She wrapped her car around a tree on Clough Pike.” Silence. Philippa has nothing to say. The silence drags on for more microseconds, and Philippa knows this is where she’s supposed to say she’ll be on the next flight, that she’s rushing to her mother’s bedside.

Instead she says, “What hospital’s she in?”

“Mercy.” Of course it’s the closest one to Clough Pike, but Philippa remembers her mom taking her out of Mercy when she’d broken her arm sledding, and they told her she’d have to...

Customer Reviews

Funny, Engaging
I am not usually drawn to male authors, but the idea seemed interesting when reading the back cover. I loved this book. I loved Mark. he's the kind of guy that a girl would love to end up with and i loved Stacey. Phillipa was a complete mess, but Stacey was beautiful. I loved how her relationship with her daughter was not perfect, how she doubted herself, how he doubted himself, never seeing the greatness that they each possessed. It was a little predictable in some ways, but it's what readers want. It's what makes a happy ending. I highly recommend this book. If you like Nick Hornby, you'd like this, except i actually identify with this book more b/c the author seemed more intuned with a woman's mind.

You oughtta know about this book
What would happen if the girl who inspired the UK punk rant "Jilted John" crossed paths with the guy who Alanis Morissette's "You Oughtta Know" was directed at? That seems to be the premise at the core of Brendan Halpin's delightful novel. There aren't a lot of unpredictable surprises to be found in the trajectory which brings Halpin's characters to their inevitable meeting, but that doesn't matter. The author has such an eye for detail and skill at characterization that in a very few pages Phillipa and Mark have become people the reader cares desperately about - such fully formed human beings that it's hard to believe they are only figments of one talented writer's imagination. Even the minor characters who come and go along the way (some are only around for two or three pages, such as Phillipa's would-be stepmother and her friend Kim) are so deftly sketched that the reader comes to care about them and is saddened when they drop out of the narrative. So if the reader has a good idea how the book will end as soon as they start reading it, it's of little consequence - the journey getting there is so well written, the details so well-observed and the protagonists have become such beloved friends that there is only one ending it could or should have.

I debated whether to give this book a four or five star review - on the one hand, I think five star reviews should be reserved for truly classic books like "Slaughterhouse Five" or "In Cold Blood," and not lavished on what is in all honesty a romance novel in hip punk rock clothes. But on the other hand this is the only book I have ever read cover to cover twice in the same week that I bought it. It's not earth shatteringly important, it's moderately predictable, but in terms of sheer enjoyability I loved it more than any book I've read in years. So five stars.

Absorbing and touching pop-infused love story
The Belle and Sebastian song of the same name seems to have provided the basic structure of this story of the convergence and romance of two damaged but likeable protagonists. The characters' extensive backstories are to some extent schematic (certain patterns from the past reassert themselves rather too obviously in the present), but the novel is enjoyable and absorbing, pop-literate without being obnoxious, and funny enough, with a voice that is always decent and humane.