Last week, I reviewed the beginning of a novel called Playing, which is a debut novel by the wife of Vikram Chandra about a woman embarking on her first S&M relationship. Though I finished the book a couple days ago, it just occurred to me that I never actually wrote about how it was, in the end.

I said last week that “I think I’m going to regret (reading Playing) in the morning.” Boy, did I ever. The late nineties/early aughts were heavy with novels starring wealthy young white women who fled from loving relationships because they couldn’t deal with them. Frequently, the wealthy young white women would flee to their parents and resume a second childhood. Sometimes, they would go somewhere that wealthy young white women don’t ordinarily go (e.g. Africa).

Usually, at the end of these novels, the women would have an epiphany that they love the man they fled from and that the man loved them, and so they return triumphantly to the arms of the man, who is waiting for the woman like a spineless wretch. The most popular of these novels was Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, whose main character fled her fiancee because she suddenly realized that he would die one day, but many of the early Oprah books followed this plot, also. Playing is one of these novels. It is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood in handcuffs, being beaten with a riding crop. Sadly, if that last sentence was put on the cover in a blurb, it would probably sell really well.