Jen Fain
Essentially the only character that matters is the narrator. Everything is perceived through her consciousness and it is not a carefully mapped out coherence, either. Not quite stream of consciousness, playing an audiobook version for someone who didn’t know it was a novel would likely have them expressing great concern about the well-being of the speaker. She is thirty-five years old, is working at the time as a tabloid newspaper “journalist” and has an extensive resume of other jobs which she’s held in the past. The book is basically a very fragmented riff on whatever might pop into her head at any given moment. She has no boyfriends or serious lovers in the traditional sense; she just occasionally mentions men in her life sometimes without any contextual hint as to whether they are part of her past or present. Of all the self-involved narrators in books published during the Me-Decade, Jen Fain is certainly worthy of contention for being one of the most me-ist of them all.
Aldo
Jen describes Aldo as a soft-spoken, gentleman from St. Louis who lives with her “between the times when he prefers to be alone. He pops up around page 68 only to disappear about twenty pages later and then reappears for a briefer twenty page stint a little later before pretty much disappearing from Jen’s consciousness entirely.
Jim
Jim is another man who “occasionally” lives with Jen. He’s a lawyer currently busy running a political campaign for a candidate who is almost certainly never going to win Jen’s vote. Not that it is an issue since Jim’s candidate dies before the end of the novel. Not that the candidate’s sudden demise is the biggest deal in Jim’s life, either. He may soon discover that he is the father of baby Jen is carrying.
