Sometimes good things happen to good people. For a couple of years in the early nineties it was my good luck to work at Spy magazine and to sit in a cubicle located between cubicles occupied by two wonderful people, Joanne Gruber to the east, and Jim Collins to the west. Jim–funny, smart, unflinchingly decent, and very tall–has just come out with a terrific novel called Beginner’s Greek, which I devoured this past weekend. The book is a very lovely romance, beautifully held together by Jim’s superb voice, which is benign, tolerant and above all, warm. Permit me to quote: “Needless to say. . . now that he was actually presented with the possibility of falling in love with a beautiful oung woman sitting next to him on an airplane, Peter was terrified. Terrified that he might actually get what he’d dreamt of getting and terrified that now, having the opportunity to get it, he would screw up. If he did not find some way to speak to the young woman, and charm her, he would kill himself. If he spoke to her and she, without even looking at him, gathered her belongings and moved to another seat, he would also kill himself. . . .For without even speaking to her, Peter was convinced, he knew for a certainty, he had not the slightest doubt, that he could spend the rest of his life with the young woman who happened to sit next to him, and it would be blissful.” I hope when God chronicles my misadventures and foibles, he is doing so in a voice as generous as Jim’s. Congratulations, Jim! Breathlessly I await Intermediate Greek.
