Tag Archives: humorous novel

Thinking About Thinking #37 – Forever Panting – Funniest book ever!

Leave a reply

I coined the term boychik lit after the Yiddish word for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. It’s a counterpoint to chick lit – humorous novels like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City – about young women on the make. Boychik lit is about young men on the make, but also popular with mature men who want to remember being young and on the make, as well as women of any age who apparently find the foolishness of all men funny.

Classic as boychik lit – which I recommend for a short read and a good laugh – is the 1973 novel Forever Panting by that master, Peter De Vries. It’s about an out of work actor who divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law, putting real spin on the old adage, “Careful what you ask for.”

And here it is. Not easy to find. Some public libraries will have it. Some banned it long ago, and perhaps no one there remembers why.

Forever Panting, one of my all-time faves, was first published in 1973. The godfather of boychik lit, De Vries is hopelessly politically incorrect these days. For example, his Slouching Towards Kalamazoo is about a high-school boy who runs away with his comely teacher. You simply cannot go there now, so have life and lawsuits imitated art in the years since.

Raised in a Christian fundamentalist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago, De Vries held notions of humor that typically involved religious hypocrisy and suburban adultery. His Mackerel Plazais about a widower minister whose late wife was so saintly and highly regarded, he fears her reputation might get in the way of his plans to marry the church secretary.

For extra credit: Who is writing such stuff now?

All three Rollo Hemphill misadventures in one ebook (Kindle or EPUB). This answers the question, “Who is writing boychik lit now?”

Thinking About Thinking #20 – Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler – Sweet and sour?

Leave a reply

Here’s my book review of Vinegar Girl,by Anne Tyler.

Vinegar Girl is a title in the publisher’s Hogarth Shakespeare series, which implies the book was inspired by one of the Bard’s plays. Tyler’s romantic comedy is not so much a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (which Broadway musical fans will recognize as Kiss Me, Kate) as it is a latter-day riff on its theme.

The main character’s name is Kate, which is the key similarity to the old tale, but this Kate is by no means a shrew. She’s an independent woman. (And perhaps that’s the essential point.) It’s not that this Kate hates men – she’s mostly indifferent to them. She honors her father, widowed Dr. Louis Battista, a ditsy research scientist who spends most of his time holed up in his lab with dozens of mice. She indulges her sister Bunny, a teen-with-attitude who (no surprise) won’t clean her room or do her own laundry. Kate tends to the two of them in a big, old house and not only washes their clothes but also cooks and does just enough housekeeping to avoid the appearance of a rat’s nest. As well, she works as an assistant at a private preschool where the teachers are mostly fussy older women who disapprove of both her unmarried status and her wardrobe, which consists of jeans and tops and the one denim skirt she wears when her pants are all in her neglected pile of laundry.

She’s not unattractive – she’s tall and slender with olive skin and long, silky black hair. But she hasn’t had a date in mouse-ages, and she isn’t sufficiently motivated to go after the only male teacher at the school, who happens to be about her age and presumably unattached. But her life’s awkward routine changes suddenly when the doctor formulates a solution to a problem that has been nagging him: The work visa of his brilliant research assistant Pyotr is due to expire. A neat resolution would be to induce Kate to marry him so the klutzy fellow needn’t go back to Russia before their research project is completed.

How this plays out won’t come as a surprise if you know your Shakespeare or your Cole Porter. As in Tyler’s other novels, the emotional turning point is subtle. One clue is an exchange between Pyotr and Kate when she warns him that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Kate begins to realize that his grasp of English is much better than he lets on when he wryly asks his “vinegar girl” why she would even want to catch flies.

Happily ever after? Gimme a break – what world do you live in? But as Kate might say if you pressed her, if she’d wanted to be bored she’d have married someone else.

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.

Thinking About Thinking #19 – How can a clever girl beat the game?

Leave a reply

Here’s my book review of An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin.

You may already know that actor-comedian Steve Martin not only writes gags and skits, but also screenplays, plays, and several books. (He’s also a talented five-string banjo player!) An Object of Beauty is a humorous novel about a scheming young woman making her way in the aristo world of New York art galleries. Oh, and you can add art connoisseur, historian, and collector to Martin’s credentials. He has his own multimillion-dollar private collection, so researching this book probably took little more effort than looking around the walls of his home and remembering details of those transactions.

Main character Lacey Yeager is a looker with brains who has no qualms about sleeping her way to the top of the art-world rat heap. She is sexy, clever, manipulative, shameless, and almost totally heedless. And in this story she goes from being a newbie intern to proprietor of her own trendy gallery. And along the way she goes through boyfriends almost as often as the Manhattan fashion trends shift. There’s the serious, caring metrosexual journalist, a gallery owner or two, a pop artist, a rich playboy broker who may be a scammer, and an FBI agent.

You’ll learn a lot about art – how it’s made, how it’s valued, and what’s in and what’s out. Lacey is one of those characters whose outrageous attitudes don’t fail to fascinate. She’ll hold your attention and keep you guessing what clever ploy she’ll try next. But, oddly enough for a book so well crafted, there are several major plot threads that simply go nowhere or are resolved in uninteresting ways. Did Martin get bored with them? Or did he decide those yarns would be too much of a hassle to spin out or explain? Or is he somehow saying – that’s life – that situation you’re worried about might not turn out as you expect – in fact, it might not go anywhere at all!

For example, I’m dying to know whether there’s a Rembrandt under that Russian painting. So if you happen to run into Steve in the grocery store, please ask him for me.

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.

Thinking About Thinking #16 – The Woody – Can politicians ever play fair?

Leave a reply

Thinking about baseball bats and fair play…

I hold author Peter Lecourt in high regard as a skilled practitioner of what I call boychik lit, or male-centered comic fiction. The Woody is a wacky satire about boneheaded liaisons in Washington politics, featuring an unlucky Congressman who gets caught with his pants down. The appearance of this book in the late 1990s coincided with the early Clinton scandals, although it’s just possible the events that inspired it had more to do with the embarrassments of Gary Hart’s earlier presidential campaign. As Jackie Mason said, “That guy was on top of everything!”

It’s stunning to think how innocent those days now seem by comparison. But as a lesson in electoral politics along with hysterical examples of how politicians screw things up, you can’t beat The Woody.

 

 

 

 

 

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.