Filipacchi, Amanda: Love Creeps

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Lynn Gallagher, a successful young gallery owner, knows what it's like to be desired. She is in fact being stalked, followed around the streets of Manhattan and peered at regularly through the windows of her workplace by a short, dumpy, balding fellow named--she later discovers--Alan. Alan doesn't inspire fear in his victim: his behavior and appearance are too ridiculous to be frightening. But Alan does inspire Lynn with envy. Having mysteriously lost her ability to feel desire for anything--food, sex, art, and so on--Lynn wants to feel for something what her stalker feels in excess for her. She decides to take up stalking herself as a therapeutic exercise, and soon selects, more or less at random, her own stalkee. Roland is a tall, reasonably attractive thirty-something who, she has reason to believe, lives conveniently close by for her purposes: "She had no intention of stalking someone who lived far away. Long-distance stalking had to be annoying."

The stalking order thus established (Alan follows Lynn who, though her heart isn't quite in it, follows Roland), the three eccentric principals of Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps pursue each other, literally, through the absurdities to follow, exploring many of the possible permutations of their love triangle while falling in and out of desire for one another.  What makes the book's plot not only possible but often hilarious is that the stalkers make no attempt to conceal their stalking from their victims or one another: "It's always about you, isn't it?" one stalker complains to his victim. "I just don't understand why you can't pick more fun things to do, out of consideration for us poor stalkers who follow you. I mean, you knew we'd follow you. You know we can't help it. If you were truly considerate, you would consult us as to which activities we could all enjoy."

The phenomenon of stalking may not seem like particularly fertile ground for humor, but Filipacchi proves that weird obsession can be drop-dead funny. Her writing is breezy, her characters deliciously flawed. Readers may not long remember the specifics of this romantic comedy's twists and turns, but they're unlikely to forget the amusing image of a trio of love-sick stalkers pursuing one another openly through the streets, swimming pools, and beading classes of New York.