Reel Time

There is some good material in this first novel by Boston comedian and writer Willis (a sometime contributor to Joan Rivers's act). There's the big, floppy carpet-munching Irish wolfhound named Rita Mae, for one. And there's the description of gentle and well-mannered lesbian sex as ""the careful exchange of orgasms."" There's also the female-to-Elvis transsexual that the heroine--a classic-film buff and rep-house projectionist named Lana Turner Tuttle--meets at the wedding of a recently-ex-lesbian to a guy named Brad. But these comic moments are spread far too thin to excuse the sketchiness of the characters (a house full of variously underemployed Boston-area lesbians) or the longueurs of the story, which chronicles the trials and tribulations of serial monogamy (dates gone predictably wrong and reminiscences of relationships gone not so originally wrong) from a lesbian perspective. Indeed, Willis leaves out too many of the basics that one expects from a novel of manners, lesbian or otherwise. (Sept.)