Davis, Anna: Cheet

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I've often wondered about the logistics of bigamy. How, that is, does the average bigamist--not your Mormon extremist type whose wives all know the hubby's sleeping around, but the regular-seeming guy with a wife and kids in Schenectady and another family in Detroit--how does that guy keep it all straight, all the personal stuff you have to remember when you're part of a familial unit? Birthdays and anniversaries in the nuclear and extended families, which set of kids is playing which sports, spousal preferences of various sorts and what you've told to whom. It's hard enough for a faithful monogamist not to get the facts wrong.

Kathryn Cheet, the protagonist of Anna Davis's Cheet, is not a bigamist, because she's not married. But she is managing--just--to keep six relationships going simultaneously. One secret of Kathryn's success is her clever use of multiple, color-coded cell phones--pink for Amy (Kathryn's one female lover), red for Jonny (her scarred musician), green for Richard (her serious guy, with daughter), and so on. Just as important for her success, Kathryn works driving a cab around London at night. Since she is always mobile and she doesn't have a radio in her car, Kathryn's lovers can only reach her by cell phone, and they never know where she will be at any particular time. Kathryn has even managed to keep the whereabouts of her apartment a secret from them--or, at least, from all but one of them. Not surprisingly, Kathryn's carefully compartmentalized world begins to fall apart in the course of Davis's novel. Evidently, you can only keep so many lovers in a single city before the worlds you've constructed with each of them begin to overlap.

Anna Davis's book, at first merely light fare, builds in suspense and gravity as the pages pass, with the reader wondering whether Kathryn, an otherwise likable character, will ever stop torturing herself and those around her with her unlikely juggling act.