Tag Archives: male fiction

Sneak Preview – My Inflatable Friend

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Rollo Returns!

The Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill series of humorous novels will be reissued later this summer. Shown here is the new cover for the first title, My Inflatable Friend.

First released in 2007 – in the same year the iPhone was introduced – the beginning of Rollo’s story presents few examples of smartphone texting and social-media interactions. It just wasn’t a thing back then.

And foremost among Rollo’s transgressions was his decision to make his girlfriend Felicia jealous with a life-sized rubber doll. That device, too, was a new thing, but times have certainly changed. This one is silicone and reportedly has her own Instagram page (this from RT, so for various reasons, beware of hacks and ads for personal applicances):

Kazakh Bodybuilder’s ‘Marriage” to Doll on Hold

Here’s a snippet of My Inflatable Friend, clipped from the audiobook narrated by the irrepressible, indefatigable Stuart Appleton, who I suggest sounds like Rollo but perhaps is a more exemplary citizen:

My Inflatable Friend audiobook (Audible)

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

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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 #31 – The Professor of Desire – Male-centered fiction – So yesterday?

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Philip Roth is best known for his classic boychik lit coming-of-age story, Portnoy’s Complaint. Remember boychik is Yiddish for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. And, all of Roth’s novels since then seem to be about self-centered males who are thinly disguised extensions of his own fragile ego.

The Professor of Desire is the first-person confession of David Kepesh, an English professor like Roth himself, who obsesses, not about finding love so much as gratifying his urges without feeling too guilty.

We meet him as overprotected young man working in his family’s business. When he wins a scholarship to attend university in London, he has his first adult relationships with a pair of Swedish girls, Elisabeth and Birgitta. Ideal as the situation might seem for a man of his age and lusts, he’s miserable. Elisabeth moves out because he’s inconsiderate. Birgitta stays and is more than willing to please, but her eagerness turns him off.

Flash forward, and David falls for gorgeous supermodel Helen, who led a shadowy past life in Southeast Asia. Ignoring the fact that she must have left her heart there, he worships her, and they marry. One day, she leaves him abruptly for Singapore to take up with her former lover. And not so much because of anything David did or didn’t do, but because she simply doesn’t care enough about him.

Now entering his forties, David takes up with Claire, a sweet shiksa from New England, a caring, sensible woman, and the relationship is too good to be true. Just when David is beginning to suspect he can’t go the distance, his widowed father shows up all excited that his son will finally make a happy marriage.

We don’t get to find out. That’s where the book ends. The Professor of Desire was published in 1977, about the time activists like Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem were redefining feminism. They were mostly successful inspiring a new generation of young women. But Roth seems to be stumbling around, muttering to himself about what it means to be a man. He really doesn’t have a clue.

I didn’t have a chance to include this comment in my radio podcast review, but revisiting this book decades later doesn’t bring any surprises about gender roles in today’s society. But what is striking is the ageism that becomes apparent in Roth’s work. At the end of the novel, David is about forty and his father is past sixty. Roth describes the older man as doddering, forgetful, and foolish. And David’s second-worst fear, after doubting his own worthiness as a companion for Claire, is that his father will die soon. If this book were written today, the portrait of the father would not be credible unless the man were in his eighties. Even then, many mature readers whose minds are still sharp would find the caricature of the senile dad distasteful.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #26 – The Centaur – How did you make it through high school?

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Here’s my book review of The Centaur, a novel by John Updike. This book’s central metaphor from Greek mythology is that Chyron, the noblest of all the centaurs, took pity on humankind. The man-beast sacrificed himself to appease Zeus.

The Chyron of Updike’s story is George Caldwell, a middle-aged high-school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. Although Caldwell would seem to be the main character, a lot of the narration is by his teenage son Peter. The lad loves his father but wishes the old man had a higher opinion of himself. George thinks he’s a loser, even though he seems to be beloved by most of his students, even the ones who mock him mercilessly.

The father-son relationship is the core of the book. Mother Cassie isn’t much of a character at all unless you sense the compassion between the lines. There isn’t much mythology in it except in bookend chapters that take us in and out. Updike seems to have done his homework and knows his Greek stories. But how those intertwine with the Caldwell family saga is obscure.

Updike’s legacy has been his Rabbit books, much like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. Updike’s came first. I sampled both and I wasn’t drawn to either. Too cynical, too bitter. Does anyone really care whether middle-class white men experience heartache and disappointment? I admit that’s a sarcastic rhetorical question. I haven’t read them all, but I suspect The Centaur might be John Updike’s best book.

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?

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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.

Thinking About Thinking #14 – Should a widowed preacher take a mistress?

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Should a widowed preacher take a mistress? Or, dare anyone write satire about religion these days? Here’s my book review of The Mackerel Plaza by Peter De Vries.

I credit humorist and poet Peter De Vries as the godfather of boychik lit, or comedies about boys and men who are less than careful with their life choices, particularly their choices of romantic partners.

The Mackerel Plaza is one of the funniest books you will ever read. That is, provided you have a sense of humor about both religion and the lusts of the flesh. Rev. Mackerel, respected leader of the People’s Liberal Church in suburban Connecticut, has a problem. His saintly wife has recently passed away. But that’s not the problem. He suspects she’s enjoying a better life. But while he’s still on Earth, he’d like to remarry. And, conveniently enough, he’s been secretly dating the church secretary, Miss Calico. There’s a double irony here. First, his congregation is so respectful of his wife’s legacy that they wish to erect a new shopping mall named in her honor – the Mackerel Plaza. Secondly, the preacher rightly worries that, even if his flock were to eventually approve of his intention to marry Miss Calico, the couple would have to wait years to set the date – not until the plaza is built, the dedication is done, and the luster of his wife’s postmortem fame begins to fade.

A humorous novel must have an engine of comedy. That is, a situation that is both ridiculous and impossible to maintain, which generates conflict, embarrassment, and laughter. An outwardly righteous man who harbors secret lusts is just such a formula. Certainly, men and women of the cloth have the same urges and flaws as the rest of us, but in someone whose social position is exalted, discovering their hypocrisies gives them farther to fall. And we do love it when our comic characters go splat.

The Mackerel Plaza was published in 1958, back when making fun of straying fundamentalist preachers wasn’t politically incorrect. Author De Vries grew up in the Dutch Reformed church in Chicago and yea those strictures gave the guy a real cramp in the you-know-where, so painful it’s hysterical.

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 #10: It’s not young love – What is it?

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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.