THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Perfect for readers who enjoy a good workplace drama as well as those who love old movies, Bock’s latest is set in the New York offices of a cable network called the Cinema Channel. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, marketing director Amy Greene and her husband, Jack, also a TV executive, have moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C., though they don’t agree on which one of them this move was actually for. She now commutes to work on Amtrak, and the reader accompanies her on these journeys through captivating, frame-by-frame narration, taking us from Union Station to Penn Station, evoking the experience of train travel in every detail. “Tickets! Tickets?” calls a conductor, and even those punctuation marks seem perfectly rendered. But just as Amy launches into this taxing plan, two things happen to up the ante: Jack has a heart attack, and her “office husband,” top dog Owen Orski, belatedly lets her in on an already signed deal to sell the network, requiring her to move back to New York immediately if she wants to stay involved. Owen and Amy enjoy matching people to the classic movie characters they most resemble, inviting a parade of glamorous old stars through the pages. One of them is John Garfield, here representing Andy Gato, an entertainment news reporter with whom Amy has a romantically charged relationship. As her brother, her adult son, his girlfriend, and her in-laws all converge on the Silver Spring rental to care for Jack in her absence, then as Jack is rushed into surgery, the profoundly loyal Amy is ever more caught between her competing loyalties. The very close third-person narration mimics the experience of ordinary consciousness, with real-world ratiocination constantly interrupted by sensory input, cravings, daydreams, and—unexpectedly—an ongoing conversation with Amy’s late parents.