An enjoyable, if a bit uneven, romantic comedy
I recently finished listening to “The Fixer Upper” by Phoebe MacLeod, a largely enjoyable romantic comedy where the romance doesn’t actually appear until near the end. It wasn’t really a bait and switch, as sometimes happens with a late-in-the-story pairing — it was pretty clear from the start where things were heading — it was more a slow burn that generated very little heat along the way, and in which the subplots were a good deal more interesting than the main story. That said, I enjoyed the book very much despite its unevenness: the characters are interesting, the narrative voice is fun, and the narration by Jess Nesling is solid.
A quick little plot synopsis first: the narrator, Alex (“a girl Alex,” as her flatmate Emma fumblingly explains upon meeting the cute guys across the landing), is an estate agent in a London suburb who has just moved into an apartment with her best friend. Her long-term boyfriend, Thomas, is an aspiring artist who has been flitting from interest to interest, and is currently obsessed with an arts college in San Francisco.
When Thomas is accepted into the San Francisco school on the flimsiest of credentials, and her flatmate starts up a romance with Mark, one of the guys across the landing, Alex finds herself a little unmoored. She starts having Sunday breakfasts with the other neighbor, Callum, a taciturn IT professional whose interpersonal skills are definitely lacking.
It isn’t until about 3/4 of the way into the book that it becomes obvious that Callum is the titular “fixer upper”: beneath his quiet, self-effacing, standoffish exterior, Alex finds his charm, and sets about trying to draw him out and improve his social skills. Of course, anyone whose read more than romcom or two saw this pairing much earlier, though the slow unfolding from Alex’s point of view is enjoyable enough.
Callum is very strongly coded “high-functioning autistic,” and it’s not a terrible portrayal of neurodiversity. Since we’re seeing him entirely through Alex’s eyes, we get very few hints of his interiority, though it’s implied that still waters run deep. The neurodivergent love interest is handled a little better in B.K. Borison’s “In the Weeds,” but MacLeod does a good job with not allowing Callum to become a charicature.
The romantic plot pales, though, compared to two of the subplots. The San Francisco trip about halfway through, when Alex and Thomas’ mother go to visit the college, has some delightfully funny moments, and moves the character development along nicely. And another sequence of events, in which Alex helps a pair of adult film producers find the perfect house and inadvertently inspires their next big project, is good fun.
Heat-wise, “The Fixer Upper” scores about half a chili pepper: the amorous action is implied and happens behind closed doors, and the adult film subplot provides some light baudiness but certainly nothing explicit. It would certainly be a safe enough audiobook to listen to with kids about 13 and up, and shouldn’t cause you to blush too much if your parents or older kids caught you reading or listening to it.
Tonally, it feels a bit like Jackie Fraser’s “The Beginning of Everything” or “The Bookshop of Second Chances”; perhaps British romances are all a bit like this, more demure and focused on subtle misunderstandings than the more broad strokes of American romance. I feel like an American version of Callum would have been quite a bit grumpier than this one, and an American Alex would be more effusive (and probably more annoying). The emotional range is a little narrower here, though still quite enjoyable.
