Book dossier

Animal husbandry

by Laura Zigman, Dorit Bril-Polaḳ

Hers began as a simple Cow-meets-Bull story: she, Jane Goodall (no, not the Jane Goodall) was the single, overachieving prime-time talk show producer with her heart on the shelf; Ray was the young executive producer with the J. Crew good looks and, it seemed, a love life as lonely as Jane's. They met for drinks, fell in love (so she thought), and looked together for an apartment. Then suddenly, inexplicably, in only the third month of their post-copulatory phase, Ray Brown was gone. When Jane, suddenly homeless, reluctantly moves in with Eddie Alden, her swaggering, womanizing coworker, she finds herself in the belly of the beast itself - the alpha male - and discovers, too, that she's not alone in the vast pasture of the brokenhearted. With a copy of Darwin's origin of Spedes in one hand and a notebook in the other, Jane sets up base camp at Eddie's and begins her research - on Eddie's bizarre chase-and-flee rituals, on the always-unlucky pairings of her best friends, David and Joan, and on her own love affair with Ray - all in a desperate attempt to unlock the mysterious methods of the male animal.