Here’s my book review of Purgatory Gardens by Peter Lefcourt. This comic novel centers on a love triangle in a retirement community. If you don’t think that’s ridiculous in itself, you’d better develop a sense of humor about old age before it sneaks up on you.
Although this is a fur piece from Lefcourt’s first rodeo, he’s not quite ready to hang up his own spurs yet. In his previous books, the protagonists are typically male, and almost always misguided. I’ve said in print before that he’s a master of a genre I call boychik lit – wise stories about young men with more chutzpah than brains. And although his heroes have tended to be middle- rather than teenaged, these men are all charmingly hapless, clueless, feckless, and frustratingly clueless. Consider, for example, the narrator of another of his books, Eleven Karens. He’s a young man who ages too rapidly through eleven disappointing relationships, each with a different female name, Karen. Then there was the presumably more mature Senator Woody White in The Woody who has trouble with his, uh, drawers. My personal favorite has been the failing-ever-upward Hollywood producer Charlie Burns, who goes from failing to make a bad movie in The Deal to creating a truly horrific TV series about a family of terrorists in The Manhattan Beach Project.
This time out, Lefcourt’s protagonist is an older but hardly wiser, New Jersey wiseguy, Salvatore Didziocomo. He’s ratted out his boss, changed his name to Sammy Dee, and moved into a condo in Palm Springs, courtesy of the Feds. Lounging around the pool and hobnobbing at homeowner meetings, he gets partially aroused at the sight of the still-comely Marcy Gray, a fading Hollywood starlet who yet aspires to do any script Jane Fonda might turn down.
But clouding Sammy’s prospects for shining through is a tall, sophisticated African, one Didier Onyekachukwu. This charming fellow knows his fine wine and cuisine, dashing dance-floor moves, and art-curatorial arcana. And it doesn’t take such refined taste or imagination for him to judge that Ms. Gray is the hotter number in the Paradise Gardens complex, also known as “Purgatory” to the residents who are willing to acknowledge their own mortality. So here we have the ultimate in male-centered comic frustration – two old guys who think about sex as often as teenage boys do, with the same result. They might get laid if by some miracle the moon turns as blue as their nether parts.
And they fight over Marcy’s attention like two doofuses at a prom. I’ll end the spoilers here by simply letting on that Sammy reverts to form and puts out a contract on Didier. Oh, and to make matters even more interesting, the intended victim may be at least as ruthless. At one time, his import-export business involved more nefarious commodities than old knickknacks.
Again, if you fail to see the comedy in all this, perhaps you should take out a long-term care policy and get on with life. Enough said about the plots.
Besides his honored rep as a writer of funny books, Mr. Lefcourt’s career has also included writing and producing movies, television, and plays. His novel The Deal and his play Sweet Talk have already made it to the big and small screens. The rumor in town now is that The Dreyfus Affair, his comic novel about a gay baseball player, is in development. Please note that I predicted early on that Purgatory Gardens will follow suit. Think The Odd Couple meets Grace and Frankie – or, as Lefcourt fans will understand – CSI Desert Hot Springs.
In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.
