Bad Connections - by Joyce Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: [New York]: Putnam, c1978.

Book Synopsis

The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived

In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg--the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp.

While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly--or anyone who loves him--the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage--with Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-own engagements.

Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her--or the reader.

Review Quotes

"Ironic, witty and always graceful." --Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room

"Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness." --Kirkus Reviews

"Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking." --Ann Douglas

"[Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson's touches are all true." --Harper's Magazine

"Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life." --The New York Times Book Review

"Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad." --The Village Voice

"The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity." --E. L. Doctorow

"Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate." --Judith Rossner

"A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women's modern lives." --Barbara Probst Solomon

About the Author

Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Café. She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.