Harry, Revised

I didn't have high hopes for my latest gym book--Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas--but it turned out to be better than I thought. The book opens with Harry sitting in a diner, waiting to work up the nerve to ask out the waitress. We know he is late for something, and it sounds like a job interview, but in the very last sentence of the chapter it is revealed that he is going to his wife's funeral.

The book is loosely influenced by The Count of Monte Cristo--Harry even orders a monte cristo sandwich in the first scene--with Harry trying to be a modern-day Dantes and helping an older waitress in the same diner. Of course, he only does so to impress the first waitress and get her to go out with him. He wants to help, but he ends up making life worse for the waitress more often than not, by acting before he really thinks through his plan. Interspersed throughout are flashbacks to his life with Anna, his wife, and we see that, along with impressing the cute waitress, Harry is also trying to atone for past mistakes. I haven't read The Count of Monte Cristo, so I can't really tell how much this book is influenced by Dumas's classic or how effective it is, but it is a worthwhile read in any case.

The only real fault I have with the book is that it is set in Los Angeles, a city I know well, but it feels more like New York. Maybe it is the diner that threw me off--while there's a diner on every corner in New York, they are few and far between in LA. Or perhaps because Anna came from and old money family in Connecticut. Something just felt very East Coasty. But a minor hang up for a pretty good book.