He’s got the rom-com down to a formula

In 2000, Billy Mernit wrote the textbook “Writing the Romantic Comedy”; eight years later, his debut novel, “Imagine Me and You,” attempts to both honor and subvert the genre he’s obviously familiar with. But sometimes a writer should be wary of what he knows.

Practicing what you teach can be a quicksand, one that has swallowed many experienced hands. Peak-oil essayist James Howard Kunstler recently wrote a science-fiction novel, “World Made by Hand,” making use of his analyses and predictions in the compulsively readable, downright post-apocalyptic book, “The Long Emergency.” Alas, in “World Made by Hand,” Kunstler’s characters are cardboard cutout archetypes created only to clumsily illustrate his theories.

The same could be said for Mernit’s novel. Divided into seven chapters, from “Setup” to “Resolution,” via “Cute Meet,” “Hook” and “Dark Moment” (after the usual steps in romantic-comedy plotting), “Imagine Me and You” too often reads like a succession of “beats” rather than an organic story, and it can’t quite shake off an over-reverence for the genre.

Mernit opens with screenwriter and romantic comedy instructor Jordan Moore, who is being dumped by his wife, the beautiful, mercurial artist Isabella, after four years of what he thought was marital bliss. She has left their bungalow in Venice, Calif., and returned home to Italy. “My big love pledged herself, before God and her mother, to stick by her man through sickness and health,” Jordan recalls bitterly, “only to desert him because she couldn’t find decent mozzarella in Los Angeles.”

Jordan decides to get his wife back -- not by procuring good cheese but by making her jealous. He cooks up an imaginary love interest, “my Naomi,” based on a former French student of his. Next thing you know, the “real Naomi” suddenly pops up in L.A. This could be a good setup for an eruption of lighthearted entanglements, but the book struggles to win us over, whether with romance or comedy.

The latter is in short supply because the writing too often comes across as calculated, creating a distance that prevents genuine humor from bubbling up. Within the first dozen pages, for instance, we meet a wise waitress, a wise homeless guy prone to one-liners and a wise friend with terminal cancer. The gallery of players paradoxically feels too dense and too skimpy, each one saddled with gimmicks rather than personalities: The best pal is a flirty rogue; the big producer has Tourette’s syndrome and the Norwegian massage therapist happens to have useful information about changelings.

Mernit’s slapstick scenes don’t grow out of the characters’ interactions or their personal quirks but from a playbook, as when Jordan awkwardly reenters the house after locking himself out, talks to the “Naomi” only he can see and endures a disastrous rewriting session with his producer’s assistant. It feels mechanical, as if Mernit is jumping through self-imposed hoops.

The romance part of the equation fares little better. In such romantic fantasy films as “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” and “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” viewers suspend disbelief, not their concern for the heroes. In “Imagine Me and You,” the leads, let’s face it, are annoying. When Jordan wails, “The gods are messing with me,” it’s tempting to mutter that he has no one to blame but himself. Meanwhile, Isabella’s abrupt departure is puzzling. When Jordan says of her, “I know how hard it must be, to live with such a sadness inside,” we’re meant to think his wife is a tragic figure, some kind of Anna Karenina lost in Jean-Paul Sartre’s land of “No Exit” (maybe off the 405?); unfortunately, this doesn’t quite jibe with the capricious prima donna we’ve gotten to know. As for the imaginary Naomi, she is less blithe spirit than dippy life coach -- “Well, there’s your project, and there’s the project that is you, Jordan.”

Throughout, Mernit inserts knowing references to the inner workings of rom-com narratives, thus indicating that he’s engaging in some kind of meta-narrative. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, but readers are left not knowing why they should care about this particular story.

Yet blaming Mernit for the frustration his novel elicits is almost beside the point. “Imagine Me and You” is all too typical of modern storytelling. In Hollywood and in literature, many authors now draw from how-to manuals, churning out tales concerned not with any kind of flesh-and-blood world but with structural devices like “opening hooks” and “wham-my charts.” Perhaps it’s time for writers to forget the television watching and workshops, and go out and smell the real roses -- then tell us what that’s like.

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Elisabeth Vincentelli is arts and entertainment editor at Time Out New York.