Pink Slip

New York editorial jobs, especially entry-level ones, can be a drag. Lisa Diodetto, the twentysomething narrator of Rita Ciresi's Pink Slip, is well aware of this, having had her fill of dismal manuscripts and pitiful paychecks. So Lisa gives up on the supposed romance of publishing, ditching her job for a corporate position in a leafy suburb somewhere along the Hudson, where she edits things such as brochures and correspondences for Boorman Pharmaceuticals. The problem is that Lisa is a hot-blooded Italian American girl whose best friend is her gay cousin, Dodie. Even as she wants to shed their old ways--pot smoking and a shared habit of dating no-good men--she doesn't exactly try to integrate into corporate culture.

Lisa's skirts are on the too-short side, she uses office hours to work on a sex-filled novel about corporate life, and she starts dating someone in senior management. He, Eben Strauss, is Jewish and straight-laced--a foil to Lisa's naughty Catholic-girl persona. On a date to West Point, she notices that "Strauss wore a pair of tortoise shell prescription glasses that made me want to jump him. As he carefully inspected the foldout map of the grounds we picked up at the visitors' information center, I speculated whether he always took his glasses off before he moved in for the kill, or if he had even been so swept away he left them on through the entire act." Needless to say, Strauss wants to visit West Point's chapels while Lisa wants to view the cadets.

Lisa likes to think that she doesn't want to be the baby-hungry wife that her older, married sister has become. But the fact is that she craves a husband and a home and eventually a kid as much as her ordinary Italian relatives do. What makes Pink Slip appealing is the way in which Rita Ciresi shows how Lisa juggles her modern aspirations and Old World desires. It's a tricky tightrope to walk. --Katherine Alberg