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In the Drink
In this compassionate, wise, and comical debut, Kate Christensen gives an engaging and authentic voice to a new generation of single urban women.
Claudia Steiner never intended for her life to become such a disaster. At the age of twenty-nine she finds herself serving as secretary to an insane, aging socialite who barks orders from her toilet, specializes in devastating backhanded remarks, and expects Claudia to ghostwrite her best-selling novels. Her job pays enough to keep her in overpriced cocktails, cabs, and take-out but doesn't cover the rent on her roach-infested apartment or keep her creditors at bay. Her romantic prospects are no better. She's hopelessly in love with her best friend, a corporate lawyer who may or may not be gay, and she's still relentlessly pursued by her ex-lover, a married unpublished epic poet. All Claudia can rely on--aside from her wry sense of humor and her faith in the medicinal properties of whiskey--is a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which gives her the glimmer of a chance for a happy ending.
Claudia Steiner never intended for her life to become such a disaster. At the age of twenty-nine she finds herself serving as secretary to an insane, aging socialite who barks orders from her toilet, specializes in devastating backhanded remarks, and expects Claudia to ghostwrite her best-selling novels. Her job pays enough to keep her in overpriced cocktails, cabs, and take-out but doesn't cover the rent on her roach-infested apartment or keep her creditors at bay. Her romantic prospects are no better. She's hopelessly in love with her best friend, a corporate lawyer who may or may not be gay, and she's still relentlessly pursued by her ex-lover, a married unpublished epic poet. All Claudia can rely on--aside from her wry sense of humor and her faith in the medicinal properties of whiskey--is a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which gives her the glimmer of a chance for a happy ending.
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 4, 1999
34 people are currently reading
740 people want to read
About the author
Kate Christensen
19 books426 followersKATE CHRISTENSEN is the author of eleven novels, most recently The Arizona Triangle (as Sydney Graves) and Good Company. She has also published two food-centric memoirs. Her fourth novel, The Great Man, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband and their two dogs.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 112 reviews
January 29, 2012
Your likelihood of enjoying this book seems fully predicated on whether it happens to be the right book at the right time for you. A good test is to skip to a seminal moment of crisis in the novel, about 200pp. in: the main character has had a truly awful day, and then comes home to find that she's run out of toothpaste, shampoo, toilet paper, and coffee -- all at once. It's not the life changes that break her but that sudden, stupid, annoying coincidence that leads her to faceplant in her bed and decide the terrors of the day will be faced at another time. How does that make you feel? If you (A) throw the book across the room in complete and total sympathy, you should put your wine glass down, pick the book back up, and read on. If you (B) throw the book across the room in complete and total fatigue regarding this preposterously immature girl, leave the book where it is and go balance your checkbook.
I think it's obvious that I chose option (A). Yes, I'm a once bright-eyed and bushy-tailed New Yorker currently at a bit of a romantic, financial, professional, and real estate low point, whose tools of choice for sanding down the rough edges are booze, solitude, and awkward afterhours encounters. As such, I raised up Claudia Steiner as something of a godsend/patron martyr, letting her show me that I'm not alone in my overeducated and overanalyzed anxiety but also letting her show, at her most extreme moments, that maybe I need to chill the fuck out a little bit. To me, the novel's resoundingly clear point is that Claudia (read: I) may have her own issues, yes, but what's really grinding her into dust is the relentlessly cruel rat race of cutthroat life in New York (or really any urban setting), a place whose rickety scaffolding of success is built strictly out of luck, coincidence, and your family's net worth and on which the tattered rags of a desicatted corporate-driven culture are hung out to dry.
Phew. That said, I can also see just as easily how, to a reader with a less existentially contorted outlook on city living, Claudia could come off as a whiny brat. She pushes away her friends, the support system she surrounds herself with is toxic, she seems physiologically incapable of making even the most trivial decisions, she's actually quite bad at her job, she's clearly much too entitled, etc. etc. etc. And perhaps that's what makes this book worth 4 stars: The reader's love/hate relationship with the troubled protagonist is really, writ small, a reflection of the entire book's constant, adroitly dissected sense of ambivalence about life -- its highs and lows regarding character, plot, ambition, motivation, tone, and beyond. This is an ambivalence that is thoroughly maddening, yes, but also thoroughly engrossing. You want to hate it, be above it, walk away, dismiss that whole worldview as entitled and immature, but you realize there is just enough truth in all this chaos that you can't discard it outright. Like the character William's hidden bottle of "expensive yuppie vodka" cut with just enough water and poured into one of the cherished crystal tumblers that become a central symbol of the book, it's bracing and harsh, but just diluted enough that you can't help but swallow it down, again and again, wincing at the taste but unable to stop.
I think it's obvious that I chose option (A). Yes, I'm a once bright-eyed and bushy-tailed New Yorker currently at a bit of a romantic, financial, professional, and real estate low point, whose tools of choice for sanding down the rough edges are booze, solitude, and awkward afterhours encounters. As such, I raised up Claudia Steiner as something of a godsend/patron martyr, letting her show me that I'm not alone in my overeducated and overanalyzed anxiety but also letting her show, at her most extreme moments, that maybe I need to chill the fuck out a little bit. To me, the novel's resoundingly clear point is that Claudia (read: I) may have her own issues, yes, but what's really grinding her into dust is the relentlessly cruel rat race of cutthroat life in New York (or really any urban setting), a place whose rickety scaffolding of success is built strictly out of luck, coincidence, and your family's net worth and on which the tattered rags of a desicatted corporate-driven culture are hung out to dry.
Phew. That said, I can also see just as easily how, to a reader with a less existentially contorted outlook on city living, Claudia could come off as a whiny brat. She pushes away her friends, the support system she surrounds herself with is toxic, she seems physiologically incapable of making even the most trivial decisions, she's actually quite bad at her job, she's clearly much too entitled, etc. etc. etc. And perhaps that's what makes this book worth 4 stars: The reader's love/hate relationship with the troubled protagonist is really, writ small, a reflection of the entire book's constant, adroitly dissected sense of ambivalence about life -- its highs and lows regarding character, plot, ambition, motivation, tone, and beyond. This is an ambivalence that is thoroughly maddening, yes, but also thoroughly engrossing. You want to hate it, be above it, walk away, dismiss that whole worldview as entitled and immature, but you realize there is just enough truth in all this chaos that you can't discard it outright. Like the character William's hidden bottle of "expensive yuppie vodka" cut with just enough water and poured into one of the cherished crystal tumblers that become a central symbol of the book, it's bracing and harsh, but just diluted enough that you can't help but swallow it down, again and again, wincing at the taste but unable to stop.
March 11, 2018
In the Drink by Kate Christensen is set in late 20th century New York City. Claudia is a young woman who had great hopes of becoming a novelist, and found the reality of big-city life quite different than her dreams.
Although the jacket synopsis describes a protagonist at a downward spiral in her life, I was attracted by the Kirkus review, which calls it 'rollicking fun'.
After just a dozen pages, I was repelled by Claudia's (evidently routine) morning status meeting in the boss's bathroom, with the hag 'starkers' on the toilet, alternately insulting Claudia and carrying on a cell phone conversation (yuck).
I wondered if Claudia eventually made a cathartic turn-around, digging herself out of her misery for an uplifting or inspiring ending...so I checked Goodreads reviews. Apparently the ending is not much of a resolution, and a reader enjoys the story only if he/she is or was in a similar life crisis.
This is one of the few books I abandoned without finishing.
Although the jacket synopsis describes a protagonist at a downward spiral in her life, I was attracted by the Kirkus review, which calls it 'rollicking fun'.
After just a dozen pages, I was repelled by Claudia's (evidently routine) morning status meeting in the boss's bathroom, with the hag 'starkers' on the toilet, alternately insulting Claudia and carrying on a cell phone conversation (yuck).
I wondered if Claudia eventually made a cathartic turn-around, digging herself out of her misery for an uplifting or inspiring ending...so I checked Goodreads reviews. Apparently the ending is not much of a resolution, and a reader enjoys the story only if he/she is or was in a similar life crisis.
This is one of the few books I abandoned without finishing.
February 25, 2015
I have no idea why I read this book.
ITD is the ideal "treadmill book" as I like to call them--books that you can read while focusing a majority of your attention on something more important. Claudia, the whiny protagonist is a pain in the rear, managing to be both inappropriately aggressive and spineless at the same time.
I think the author really wanted to address Claudia's glaringly obvious alcoholism but wasn't sure how to, so she sprinkled in a few flippant remarks suggesting that Claudia might have a substance abuse problem but maybe not but maaaaaaaybe (probably) she does.
I would recommend this book to someone who is just learning to read because it is only about 200 pages long and even has a cat in it.
ITD is the ideal "treadmill book" as I like to call them--books that you can read while focusing a majority of your attention on something more important. Claudia, the whiny protagonist is a pain in the rear, managing to be both inappropriately aggressive and spineless at the same time.
I think the author really wanted to address Claudia's glaringly obvious alcoholism but wasn't sure how to, so she sprinkled in a few flippant remarks suggesting that Claudia might have a substance abuse problem but maybe not but maaaaaaaybe (probably) she does.
I would recommend this book to someone who is just learning to read because it is only about 200 pages long and even has a cat in it.
July 27, 2008
I read the whole book, so that says something. The narrative is enough to keep you in the book, but the characters were flat and cliche and the story has been done. It was interesting that the end doesn't really resolve anything. But, by halfway through the book I was so tired of Claudia (the main character) and her sorry for herself self that can't pull it together I wanted to slap her. Those are not the kind of young, urban female characters that I want to see.
April 8, 2011
I loathe this book. It's the opposite of compelling. It's like she's daring you to walk away and do something else, anything else.
September 12, 2013
Claudia Steiner's life is like a train wreck. She has a dead end job as a secretary for a crazy and aging socialite who is a bestselling author; in actuality, Claudia ghostwrites the books for a mere pittance. She doesn't make nearly enough to pay her numerous bills, including her rent in a ridiculously roach-infested Manhattan apartment. At twenty-nine, it is starting to look as if she won't make it after all. Her own writing dreams might not come true.
She struggles to get through her days, barely managing to escape the constant yelling and criticism of her demanding boss, so she buries it all at night by visiting various clubs and drinking excessively. Her colorful friends are all staving off their own drudgery in the clubs at night, and I felt like I recognized a few of them from my own days in this scene.
Her life does have one bright spot: her lifelong friend William, whom she has known since they were classmates in a small town in Arizona. But she is also in love with him. What will become of her? How will she get him to reciprocate her feelings when she can't even tell him how she feels?
Claudia's first person narrative has a wry humor to it. She seems to be laughing at herself and her many foibles as she shares what life is like for her. As much as I cringed whenever Claudia made still another error in judgment, I also smiled inwardly and with fondness. There is something so appealing about this young woman that made me root for her.
In the end, when her life seemingly implodes and lies around her like so many broken eggshells, she still manages to pick herself up and figure out what to do next. I loved "In the Drink: A Novel" and enjoyed reading every page. A definite five star read from an author who has rapidly become one of my favorites.
She struggles to get through her days, barely managing to escape the constant yelling and criticism of her demanding boss, so she buries it all at night by visiting various clubs and drinking excessively. Her colorful friends are all staving off their own drudgery in the clubs at night, and I felt like I recognized a few of them from my own days in this scene.
Her life does have one bright spot: her lifelong friend William, whom she has known since they were classmates in a small town in Arizona. But she is also in love with him. What will become of her? How will she get him to reciprocate her feelings when she can't even tell him how she feels?
Claudia's first person narrative has a wry humor to it. She seems to be laughing at herself and her many foibles as she shares what life is like for her. As much as I cringed whenever Claudia made still another error in judgment, I also smiled inwardly and with fondness. There is something so appealing about this young woman that made me root for her.
In the end, when her life seemingly implodes and lies around her like so many broken eggshells, she still manages to pick herself up and figure out what to do next. I loved "In the Drink: A Novel" and enjoyed reading every page. A definite five star read from an author who has rapidly become one of my favorites.
June 10, 2009
I actually really liked this book, but mostly because I could so easily relate to it at this point in my life. It was one of those "perfect timing" books. The protagonist, Claudia, is frustrated with her life in NYC. She lives in a shanty of an apartment; she eats, drinks, and spends money irresponsibly; she is pining after her male best friend who she is sure does not feel reciprocal interest; and most of all, she is terribly dissatisfied with her work. Her feeling of futility with life comes through Christensen's words like a disease, and it is a disease I fear I have caught at least once-a-week. She feels better than her current station in life--or, rather, the workforce--but she also feels trapped within what she is able and permitted to do.
Honestly, I can imagine the frustration of ghostwriting someone else's novel, which is why I would never agree to do it. Claudia is trapped in the cloak of invisibility, and that cloak easily translates itself into insignificance. The most poingnant scene in the book is one in which she leans out over the subway tracks and imagines invisible hands pushing her in front of the oncoming train. Anyone who says they haven't experienced a moment like this would be lying.
All in all, the book is no literary feat of excellence; the plot lacks "drive" and the characters (except for Claudia's employer Jackie, who is quite distinctive in a love-to-hate-her kind of way) are not particularly memorable. Still, I related to this book, and all of the setting details that placed it in NYC were spot-on. It's worth a look for anyone intimate with NYC or who feels frustrated with his/her station in life.
June 3, 2008
Like many first novels, In the Drink feels a little formulaic (just a tiny bit) and a little less accomplished than later works by the same author. That said, even here Christensen creates a strangely sympathetic, chronically down-on-her-luck heroine and recreates a lovingly and closely observed New York City in the sunset days of the 20th century. As Claudia Steiner struggles with a hopeless mountain of debt, soul-sucking underemployment, unrequited love, and, yes, a creeping but unmistakable drinking problem, she finds herself wondering how this became her life and what she is going to do about it.
The novel never flags--which is one of my frequent complaints about first novels--and the ending is winsomely and delicately ambiguous. Where a lesser author would have reached for a neat, packaged, even deus-ex-machina resolution, here there are no magical, romantic solutions for the mess Claudia has made of her life. And yet somehow there is a buoyancy to this narrative and a core of resilience in its protagonist that keeps you reading and makes you like Claudia, in spite of her many flaws.
The novel never flags--which is one of my frequent complaints about first novels--and the ending is winsomely and delicately ambiguous. Where a lesser author would have reached for a neat, packaged, even deus-ex-machina resolution, here there are no magical, romantic solutions for the mess Claudia has made of her life. And yet somehow there is a buoyancy to this narrative and a core of resilience in its protagonist that keeps you reading and makes you like Claudia, in spite of her many flaws.
February 7, 2008
She's the friend of a friend and that friend sort of recommended this to me. It depressed me because it described my life at the time perfectly and it was like reading my own journals. Which either means that I should be making whatever money she made off of this piece of crap or that she's awesome (and I'm a total slacker for getting my journals published). But I didn't really feel awesome after reading this. Depressing.
August 22, 2016
There was a woman-child who drank too much and ruined her life, the end. There, I just saved you six hours of reading. (Is there some hidden meaning behind the Italian model who comes to visit and takes care of the cat the main character abandons? Maybe it went over my head.)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 19, 2022
I decided to reread this on a whim (largely because I'm COVID positive, stuck in my apartment, and close to losing my mind because of being stuck in isolation) and what strikes me about Christensen's debut novel is how much more alive and measured it is compared to a lot of the other "young woman finds herself" novels that came out during this period. The empathy and connection that we see in Christensen's later books is quite ample here. I don't know if I buy into the whole writing as an escape mechanism plot, but I did enjoy the fact that Claudia is portrayed as a screwup, but never mocked or ridiculed.
September 10, 2007
After Maud Newton came down heavy this summer on Kate Christensen book recommendations, and because she's coming to read soon, I decided to give her a whirl by reading two back-to-back. With this one, I was hoping for something light but well written and addictive that I could ingest in a couple days. Didn't really grab me at first - par exemple, a whole page on the cockroaches in her character's Manhattan apartment? and do we have to follow her through every nap and walk across the park? - but soon enough the whole self-destructive character capable of change thing sucked me in. Even if it's cheesily implied that she went on to write this very book.
May 12, 2013
I found this book to be frustrating. I'm not sure if the author wanted us to feel sorry for the main character or not, but I definitely didn't. She obviously had a problem with alcohol which caused her to never achieve anything in life. Throughout the entire book she bemoaned her "fate" while watching those around her succeed, yet she never once did a thing about it. I thought there would be a breakthrough in the end, but the vague and weak ending left me feeling like she hadn't learned a thing. A depressing look at a life being wasted by alcohol abuse, laziness, and a sense of entitlement. It wasn't worth the time I put into reading it.
October 22, 2012
this book is about everything being terrible and the 90s and nyc in the 90s, which are three of my favorite things, so.
certainly, it was written neither for the hopeful, nor those who never checked their answering machine from a pay phone, but i'm sure those people (YOU PEOPLE) have their (YOUR) own little "books," but for the rest of us--those yearning for the female followup to 'joe's apartment'--there is this, and it is great.
certainly, it was written neither for the hopeful, nor those who never checked their answering machine from a pay phone, but i'm sure those people (YOU PEOPLE) have their (YOUR) own little "books," but for the rest of us--those yearning for the female followup to 'joe's apartment'--there is this, and it is great.
September 15, 2008
"In the Stink" is more like it. As in stinking drink and stinking prose. I know I read this book because I recall hurling it across the room when I finished screaming, "What kind of Junior's Leg bullshit is this???"
Junior's Leg was another book with a similar protag, but the prose in that was much much worse.
Junior's Leg was another book with a similar protag, but the prose in that was much much worse.
July 17, 2012
I hated Claudia. I found nothing redeeming in her self-destructive character. I was looking for a light read but instead found a depressing story about a thieving, selfish alcoholic. I was expecting a change of heart in the end, but instead she got evicted from her apartment and broke into her employers house to sleep on her couch. My favorite character was the poor cat.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 16, 2010
Slow going story of a would-be writer passively waiting for her life to start and whiling the time away drinking. Ultimately, this character is hard to connect with and while the drinking scenes enliven the story, they aren't that interesting either. Meh.
September 28, 2013
This book was a cute story and could be funny but it just dragged on!! Its a book filled with fancy worded fluff. Full of nonsense. She would take 2 pages to talk about the atmosphere of a park. Too much. Too boring. Too fluffy.
October 30, 2007
When I read this in my early thirties, I could still relate to the struggles of a young, single woman finding her way.
December 5, 2007
Didn't do justice to one of my favorite subjects- Booze- And I like cheezy chick books- but I can say not so in this case.
January 5, 2008
I had high hopes for book on drinking. It really fell short.
Read
August 21, 2020Kate Christensen's writing is charming, but I had a difficult time getting through this novel as it fell flat in many ways.
July 10, 2023
I've been meaning to leave a review for Kate Christensen's brilliant and darkly funny "In the Drink" since I first read it in 1999 and fell ridiculously in love with Claudia Steiner, its brittle antiheroine. Like so many other great novels, "In the Drink" was swept up in the “chick lit” fever sparked by the success of Helen Fielding's also brilliant and funny "Bridget Jones's Diary." Though Bridget and Claudia share many qualities (boozy, socially inappropriate, bad with money, stuck in crap jobs, love all the wrong people), Claudia is spikier and so is her story. A talented but frustrated journalist, Claudia slaves as ghostwriter and whipping girl for a papery beast of a pseudo-countess, churning out lurid, socialite-infested bestsellers for a measly wage and no byline. She also pines for her unattainable best friend, shirks her rent, steals, slithers out of responsibilities, resorts to betrayal in retaliation for genuine and imagined injustices, and comes face to face with what might be a very real drinking problem. (And her cat hates her.) Like Bridget, Claudia does seem to find her happy ending in someone else's arms, but on closer read her future still hangs by a thread. Kate Christensen's prose sparkles and seethes with gallows humor and unflinching insight. Also? "Chick lit" is a misogynistic and dismissive term for books by and/or about women and should be set on fire, along with the luddites who coined it.
August 18, 2022
I'd grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn't really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I'd absorbed the idea that courtship and marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup.
Claudia's not doing great. Almost thirty and her fabulous New York life means living in a terrible studio apartment she can't even afford, ghost-writing for a confused and abusive socialite while also working as her personal assistant, in love with her best friend, who has never given her the slightest encouragement and drinking far more than would be a good idea for a stevedore. This is Kate Christensen's first novel. It was published in 1999 and is very much a snapshot of a specific time, and it's also witty and funny in a we're-all-drowning-so-let's-have-a-laugh kind of way.
I really love this kind of novel, where a woman gets herself into a mess of her own making and her attempts to right things either works or goes disastrously wrong. Claudia was a wreck, but she was so funny in a Dorothy Parker kind of way and the author has taken the time to give her and the secondary characters real depth. I highly recommend this book for readers who like this kind of thing.
Claudia's not doing great. Almost thirty and her fabulous New York life means living in a terrible studio apartment she can't even afford, ghost-writing for a confused and abusive socialite while also working as her personal assistant, in love with her best friend, who has never given her the slightest encouragement and drinking far more than would be a good idea for a stevedore. This is Kate Christensen's first novel. It was published in 1999 and is very much a snapshot of a specific time, and it's also witty and funny in a we're-all-drowning-so-let's-have-a-laugh kind of way.
I really love this kind of novel, where a woman gets herself into a mess of her own making and her attempts to right things either works or goes disastrously wrong. Claudia was a wreck, but she was so funny in a Dorothy Parker kind of way and the author has taken the time to give her and the secondary characters real depth. I highly recommend this book for readers who like this kind of thing.
July 1, 2024
Not gonna lie: bought this because it said “laugh out loud funny” and I l liked the cover art.
Was not laugh out loud funny, but I was amused. Lead character a little annoying. Her boss was worse. It’s interesting to read now because it all happens before cell phones and lots of communication was done via answering machine.
I’ll search out another of her books because I’d like to see how she evolved (this was her first book).
Was not laugh out loud funny, but I was amused. Lead character a little annoying. Her boss was worse. It’s interesting to read now because it all happens before cell phones and lots of communication was done via answering machine.
I’ll search out another of her books because I’d like to see how she evolved (this was her first book).
March 18, 2018
I really wanted to like this book-the writing was well done, enjoyed the main character somewhat, but I wanted her to grow up, make good choices, etc. The ending really disappointed me. I was like-this is it?
August 12, 2018
Fun look of life in New York in the 1990’s for a young woman who has minimal career aspirations who is currently a secretary and ghostwriter for an older socialite. Kind of fluff but nevertheless an enjoyable read.
June 5, 2019
It was an interesting read with a lot of drinking involved by the main character. Parts of the story were entertaining--just when she thought Jackie died. Otherwise, i just wanted to see what the ending would be like. Well, i reached the end and i'm still wondering?!.....
May 11, 2019
Loved every delicious word of In the Drink. I feel like Christensen wrote this book just for me.
August 21, 2019
Great read. Characters I could relate to; some I hated; some I felt sorry for; and others that me laugh.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 112 reviews