Meet Betty Block--docile daughter, woebegone wife, aspiring aspirant, and anti-heroine for the ages! Or is the narrator of Madeline McDonnell's farcical, heartbreaking, and formally brilliant first novel just another woman caught in the sneakily patriarchal plots of the early-aughts? And has she left her ostensibly sensitive husband for an hour or two or forever?

As Betty pulls up a chair at the Lonesome Ballroom and tries to explain herself to Lizzie, her erudite-but-distant bartender, she finds herself as trapped by her generation's competing expressions of sincerity and sarcasm as her mother was by the incomplete feminism of the '70s and her grandmother by the insidiously sweet storylines of Hollywood's Golden Age.

An inquiry into gender's relationship to popular aesthetics that swirls from ancient epics to turn-of-the-millennium reality shows, mid-century melodramas to neo-noir car chases, beauteous battle scenes to boy-next-door meet-cutes, Lonesome Ballroom is also a dazzling and rambunctious performance in prose.