Fourth Comings Review

This may be the longest of Jessica’s journals even though it only covers a heavy eight days, starting with Jessica contemplating a break up and Marcus proposing.

There’s a lot of love in this book as well as money, primarily the complexities of dealing with it at the tender age of 23. Even though she’s broke, subsisting on fake employment as her niece’s overpaid nanny and living with Manda, the skank extraordinair and Hope, Jessica isn’t ready to let go of her love affair with New York.

But Marcus hates the city. As much as she loves Marcus, she can’t quite imagine the idea of leaving the potential she has in NY to move to New Jersey where she has no prospects except being Marcus’ girlfriend.

There’s love between them but is that enough? What happens when love transforms to just companionship? To resentment? Scientifically, married couples are happier but isn’t that just limerace or confusing contentment with adore. Jessica is back to her overthinking self by contemplating her past and present with Marcus, and if they will be able to evolve with each other instead of continuing their patterns of connecting and separating.

This extends to her friends and family from Bridget and Percy deciding to hold off their marriage to Jessica worrying about her parent’s potentially divorcing as her mother focuses more on her job and Botox than her Dad. All give varying perspectives about what is most important in choosing marriage. There’s safety, financial security, having no other choice, love, of course.

There are also obstacles as we finally see Hope briefly fall from Jessica’s pedestal when they get into their first fight. Her jealousy and paranoia over Hope and Marcus communicating behind her back and their elementary school connection making her question all the counterfactuals of “what could have been?” It’s never a good thing when the potential of what might have been is affecting her present but that’s the way Jessica thinks. Past affects present affect future.

Other characters mistake nostalgia and comfortability as placements for the elusive search for happiness when that isn’t possible. Humans are wired to be more disappointed by their rejections than remember their happiness when they do get what they want.

I know I’m taking a more philosphical route instead of discussing character development but I’m trying to keep it spoiler free. Besides, McCafferty experiments with the journal entries this time by having Jessica address them to Marcus which involves some flashbacks, flashforwards and imagination spots as Jessica tries to wrangle her thoughts into words for Marcus without censoring herself. That’s another problem she has letting go of, feeling judged by Marcus’ enlightened third eye, and the feeling that she doesn’t quite know the elusive, performative Marcus Flautie.

This was a great book for Marcus even though he’s off the page for most of it as Jessica begins to see a pattern of predictability in Marcus’ unpredictability and how his personas shield a self crying out for help but unable to accept it much like Jessica. Plus we meet his even more elusive brother, Hugo!

Not that it’s all philosphical musings and love drama as there’s plenty of funny bits courtesy of Marin, Bethany and the rest of the dysfunctional Darlings as well as the return of Dexy’s tone deaf enthusiasm, and Cinthia’s pretentious social upper crust scene that so precisely captures the blase attitude of commercialism, materialism, capitalism all in the name of showing how good you are to the orphans in Africa when most of them can’t even point to Africa, they just want their name in the paper. Out hip the hipsters. I mean, we still have all that today but it just feel very specific to the early 2000s.

Unfortunately, this breaks the streak of 5 stars as I found this story to be a bit too in Jessica’s head without enough humorous asides to Jessica’s real life exploits to balance it out. Plus I can only take so much overanalysis of the era’s crass commercialism over substanstive issues before my brain promises to explode from academia.

4 stars.