Some Nerve

Some Nerve
Jane Heller

In a Nutshell
Ann Roth is everything a journalist is stereotyped to be, bar one thing: she’s nice. She doesn’t fish for gossip, she doesn’t write stories based on rumours, and she doesn’t badger people for comments. It’s for this reason, however, she’s about to lose her job. Unless she can become a “killer journalist” and get an interview with the incredibly reclusive it-boy Malcom Goddard, she’ll get kicked off the staff at Famous magazine. So Ann does the only thing, really, someone can do when their head is on the chopping block—she breaks her own rules. And it almost works, too. She gets the interview, but on one condition: it must be done on a plane while Malcom is flying. Pity Ann has a phobia of flying.

Mustering up as much dignity as possible, she returns home to Missouri, jobless and depressed. But just when she’s about to give up on ever getting her job at Famous back, a miracle occurs: it just so happens that Malcom has just been booked in for surgery at the local Missouri hospital. Ann will do whatever it takes to get an interview out of him—but what will it cost her in the end?

What’s right with it?
Ann, for being so nice, is refreshingly blunt in a world where fluff and ass-kissing gets you everywhere. As a journalist-in-training myself, her desperation to get the story is something I can sympathise with—it makes her situation extremely realistic. Her family, too, is a constant source of amusement—a bunch of phobics, with fears of everything from medicine to walking outdoors.

What’s wrong with it?
While I was reading the book I got the distinct impression that Heller was trying to write a story far more serious than it actually is. The constant attempts at questioning morality and ethics are half-hearted at best, and you don’t believe them anyway. It’s clear from the very basis of the plot—volunteering at a hospital, befriending the star to get the interview—that there is nothing righteous about what Ann is trying to do, even though Heller would like us to believe otherwise. In the end, she goes just as low as she can go to get the story. Desperation calls for drastic measures, and for Ann it is to completely disregard the beliefs that so cemented her personality in the first half of the story.

Even though the story, and its outcome, has been done many times in many different ways, I found the author didn’t succeed in making any parts of it original. She obviously tried, by weaving in various sub-plots to give the story more depth, but it didn’t work—ultimately resulting in a plot that is riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese. Many of these subplots—such as the shady dealings of the hospital—are only explored a little, and then completely dropped towards the end without further mention, even those that had quite serious undertones. I got the impression they were just merely space-fillers, which in my opinion is just a waste of pages.

Last word
Even though a deeper plot was attempted, in the end Some Nerve is just a mindless, breezy chick-lit. The plot was just too convenient, even for suspended disbelief, and it gives the impression of work that is only partially finished.

Scale-of-awesomeness
Clean the house instead