Tag Archives: satire

Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry – A Satire on Sexual Politics

The book categories Amazon has assigned to the bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry are “Mothers & Children Fiction,” “Humorous Fiction,” and “Literary Fiction.” All are apt, up to a point. It’s about an unwed mother who is raising an only female child. The plot is suffused with humor and oddball antics. And, yes, the prose in this first novel from Bonnie Garmus is masterful.

Lessons in Chemistry. A frivolous entertainment it’s not.

But the most fitting category, I think, would be something like, “Bitterly Satiric Feminist Fiction.” Main character Elizabeth Zott is a research scientist in the 1950s who is misunderstood and maligned in every conceivable way. When her career in molecular research is blunted and blocked by arrogant males, she steps into the role of daytime TV star, almost by chance. She hosts an afternoon live cooking show – and she decides to use every one of her recipes as a lesson in chemistry – both physical (as in, elements and reagents) and political (advice to housewives who lack self-confidence).

As to comedy, many situations are indeed humorous, but most have a sardonic edge. And some readers may be surprised that Elizabeth’s misfortunes include rape, sudden death of her beloved partner (one of only a few men in the book who act nobly), abusive employment, emotional battering, vicious gossip and character assassination, theft of her scholarly work, and multiple instances of deception and fraud.

Ultimately, funny it’s not meant to be.

Setting the plot in the past – in the consumer-crazed postwar era in America – serves to heighten contrast – in fact, the lack of significant differences – with today’s state of affairs.

Zott’s daughter Madeleine – Mad, for short – is a precocious kid who could read adult-themed novels before she started elementary school.

This book might be an answer to such a child’s question today, “Mommy, who was Gloria Steinem?”

Mick & Moira & Brad – A post-#MeToo story. Is it’s comedy too polite?

 

His only inflatable friend is his swelling ego…

 

What is a young man’s most vulnerable part?

You’d think Rollo would be discouraged, but he continually fails upward.

I suspect that only an avid new female readership will make it possible to resurrect popular interest in male-centered romantic comedies. As evidence it’s women to the rescue, I offer the expert opinion of none other than Jane Austen, who wrote in 1813:

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

Literature of the late twentieth century was dominated by male authors. In fact, there was an unrelenting series of Johns, including O’Hara, Steinbeck, Cheever, Updike, and Irving. Humor in the category of literary fiction was dominated by the hirsute likes of Wodehouse, Thurber, Mencken, De Vries, Lefcourt, and Barry. Exceptions included Dorothy Parker, who made a career of lampooning men, and Erma Bombeck, who picked unmercifully on housewives.

Since that time, book industry statistics show that women now buy more books than men do — and today they hold many of the managerial posts at publishing houses. In the area of comedy, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, appearing in 1996, set off a firestorm of book buying in the now sensationally popular genre of chick-lit.

So, one might ask, “Is male-centered comic fiction still a thing?” It is, I suggest, if women embrace it, starting with poor Rollo.

In February, Rollo #1 (the inflatable one) is 99c on Amazon Kindle and FREE from EPUB stores. The other two books in the series are reduced to $2.99 in either format.

The audiobook of My Inflatable Friend is available from Audible and other audio booksellers.

Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill - 3 book series

 

 

 

 

Ever Wonder What It Takes to Make a Pop Singer a Star?

 

With the Grammy Awards – Music’s Biggest Night – set to take place on February 5th, it’s the perfect time to talk about how a music celebrity – like Beyonce´ and Lady Gaga – finally makes it!

A new book – “Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy,” by award-winning author Gerald Everett Jones, is rich with insights into “the biz” – which includes Hollywood and especially the music industry. The book offers a tantalizing view of how major entertainment agencies manufacture celebrity.

The story revolves around a woman with a talent for singing who’s plucked from the legal profession by an aggressive Hollywood agent who reps famous singers…and is determined to do the same for the character known as Moira. But her arrogant billionaire boyfriend has his own plans for his girlfriend and these three characters may butt heads and sparks fly.

Gerald is available for interviews to discuss the timely themes about surrounding his new book – especially how a music star is born and can be thrust into the limelight of pop stardom.

He can also share his “recipe for success,” when it comes to developing stories and characters.

– Paul Sladkus, Host, Good News Planet

Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy – Gerald’s thirteenth novel, available in Kindle from Amazon and trade paperback from booksellers worldwide.

 

New Rom-Com Shows How Hollywood Manufactures Celebrity

LaPuerta Books and Media announces the December 27 release of Gerald Everett Jones’s thirteenth novel, “Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy.”

Witty dialogue is very much the order of the day. Hollywood trade secrets – and gossip – are the center of it. Mick McGraw is an aggressive Hollywood agent who reps famous singers. Moira Halimi-Joubert is a headstrong criminal defense attorney who studied opera. Brad Davenport is an arrogant billionaire hedge-fund manager who has a soft spot for dogs. Mick wants to make Moira a superstar, but she may have to dump Brad.

What does the battle of the sexes look like when the combatants are equally matched – and might actually like each other? #MeThree?

The twisty plot takes rom-com fans inside a big-time movieland packaging agency as Mick’s team scrambles to put together a stadium concert patterned on Cher’s “Farewell Tour.” The superstar they’ve scheduled has canceled just nine weeks before opening night. They need a totally new show theme – and a new star. With Moira in the role, her “Follow This!” show brings back famous names and songs from pop culture – and surprises everyone, including Moira, who must decide whether to pay the high price of fame.

The book has already attracted rave reviews. Showbiz insider Roberta Edgar, coauthor of the award-winning book “Million Dollar Miracle” says, “This is smartly written with strong, sometimes very witty, dialogue. The narrative is rich with insights into “the biz,” particularly the music industry. Jones nails the latest in upscale fashion and other contemporary cultural trends. The story is fun, it moves fast, and it’s about Hollywood.”

“Readers’ Favorite” reviewer Pikasho Deka writes, “A seamless blend of witty dialogue, humor, and romance makes ‘Mick & Moira & Brad’ a thoroughly entertaining read you don’t want to put down. Gerald Everett Jones’s novel is a treat for anyone who loves romantic comedies. With a fast-paced plot and vibrant characters – whom you’re not going to forget soon – the narrative feels like a breeze. The three main characters, Mick, Moira, and Brad, all have strong yet distinct personalities that create a compelling dynamic, which is a delight to the reader. Their interaction involved some humorous and quick back-and-forth dialogue, and those were some of my favorite scenes from the book. If romantic comedy is your go-to genre, you will have a blast with this one.”

As these reviewers agree, the book offers a tantalizing view of how major entertainment agencies manufacture celebrity. As Jones describes Moira’s new stardom, “Show business wasn’t just a job change. She’d jumped into an alternate universe, a phantasmic place with its eccentric traditions, rules, and jargon. A place where talent was never enough, where emotions are manufactured, delivered, and manipulated as a product.”

Himself a veteran of the Los Angeles music business, John Rachel, author of the recently released novel “Love Connection: Romance in the Land of the Rising Sun,” applauds the showbiz realism: “A star is born? Not anymore. A star is manufactured. Gerald Everett Jones in a style of storytelling that is uniquely his and endearingly superb has spun a riveting yarn of an epic makeover, a young lady who’s plucked from the legal profession and thrust into the limelight of pop stardom. It’s a fascinating look behind-the-curtain at what goes into the creation of music icons like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.”

“Mick & Moira & Brad” is available for preorder in trade paperback from booksellers worldwide, as well as in Kindle e-book format from Amazon. The release date is December 27, 2022.

Gerald Everett Jones lives in Santa Monica, California. This book is his thirteenth novel. He is a board member of the Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC), a Film Independent (FILM) Fellow, and a winner of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Diversity Award. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the College of Letters, Wesleyan University, where he studied under novelists Peter Boynton (“Stone Island”), F.D. Reeve (“The Red Machines”), and Jerzy Kosinski (“The Painted Bird, Being There”).

Learn more about the author, including his other multiple-award-winning novels, at his website geraldeverettjones.com.

[Featured photo credit: The Everett Collection. Author photo: Gabriella Muttone, Hollywood]

CONTACT INFORMATION
LaPuerta Books and Media
La Puerta Productions
+1 310 742-5656
Contact Us

Thinking About Thinking: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Happy World

The Big Ball of Wax: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Happy World by Shepherd Mead. Here’s the cover of the Ballantine Books mass-market paperback I read back in the day. It’s now available on Kindle.

That’s the subtitle of Shepherd Mead‘s 1954 novel, The Big Ball of Wax.

Do you wonder – perhaps with trepidation and creeping anxiety – what the socioeconomic impacts of Virtual Reality (VR) might be?

Well, author Mead did that with painful humor back in 1954, before the maestro of Meta was even an embryo. Now that some are betting the high-tech farm on VR, perhaps we’d do well to take another look at this crusty tale.

It describes an invention that is See-Hear-Taste-Smell-Touch-o-Vision. Spoiler alert: Formerly thoughtful people check into cheap hotel rooms with no change of clothes and a bushel bag of uncooked rice, never to be heard from again.

Rehearsing brain surgery by VR seems like a sensible idea. But – wondering where your friends (or your kids) are because they’ve disappeared into an illusory fifth dimension?

Mead was also the author of another more popular cautionary tale – How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I suspect some tech tyros are also unknowingly following that example, as well.

 

Book Review – Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Leave a reply

Here’ my book review of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

Of course, she’s not – fine, that is. This isn’t a spoiler. You’d have to suspect as much from the outset. As one of my screenwriting mentors was fond of saying, “No one wants to see The Village of the Happy People.”

Soon after sitting down with this novel, I picked up on its homage to the themes of the book that spawned the contemporary chick-lit genre, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (1996). Bridget’s story owes its aspirational plot to Pride and Prejudice, the 1813 romance by Jane Austen. Both books follow what literary critics have since termed the marriage plot. That is, the female main character’s overwhelming and obsessive goal is to meet and marry the man of her dreams – or, at least, someone who will care for her forever, giving her the kind attention, comfort, and – most important, social standing – that a woman of her fine sensibilities deserves.

[Aside] In counterpoint, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Marriage Plot (2011) to examine (and not satirically) whether the marriage plot applies at all to the young people of contemporary society. It’s a fascinating alternative romance, involving a set of relationships that go at least four ways. But other than demonstrating that the old rules don’t apply, Eugenides offers no prescriptive message for the future.

But back to poor Eleanor. She’s a young, highly intelligent, single woman in the urban society of today’s Glasgow. She holds a sensible and reliable job as an accountant in a small graphic design firm. She calls the designers “the creatives.” They are trendy and self-confident. Her mates regard her as lackluster and back-office.

Eleanor tells her story in the first person, confessing her foibles, her aspirations, and her hangups. She believes she is flawed both physically and emotionally, but she persists in her belief that she is, overall, fine – coping nicely. Her goals seem limited and achievable – until she develops a crush on a handsome musician. He’s a local struggling artist who already has something of a name and a rep. They’ve never met. She admires him from a distance, until her following him verges on outright stalking.

Meanwhile, Eleanor has developed a real, albeit awkward, friendship with Raymond, a geeky schlump at the office. He seems much more interested in her than she is in him.

Do you have enough clues so far? You’d be right in suspecting that Eleanor’s story isn’t just another retelling of Bridget’s. You’d also rightly suspect – and I’ll stop short of spoilers here – that the rock star will be less than stellar and the schlump will be surprisingly sympathetic.

But it’s not just a relationship story, regardless of its homage to the marriage plot. Eleanor has serious issues as chilling as today’s grimmest headlines, and she’s in denial about how well she’s coped. How she eventually confronts the conflicts in her own psyche will be found in Gail Honeyman’s ultimately devious and unsuspected twists of plot.

Woody Allen meets Nick Hornby in this hilarious beach read. Gerald Everett Jones, who is every bit as clever as Larry David (and has more hair!), has created a witty, literate George Costanza for us to savor. NBC, are you paying attention? — Paula Berinstein, producer and host of The Writing Show podcast

Sneak Preview – My Inflatable Friend

Leave a reply

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)

Christmas Karma – What gift does Willa want most?

Leave a reply

What gift does Willa want most?

Hint: It’s not under the tree.

Photo 123r.com

She wishes she’d said a few more things to her mother. She yearns to see her son again, but she’s pretty sure that can’t happen. If she could find a way to push her father out of her house, she would. He says it’s still his and he wants to sell it.

In my humorous novel Christmas Karma, Willa Nawicki gets a series of surprise visits from friends and family – just a week before the holiday and when she’s totally not ready to talk to anyone, much less clean her house.

So why not let Willa’s story lighten your mood as a break from your holiday tasks?

The screenplay version of Christmas Karma won a Writers Guild of America Diversity Award.

(Buy the Kindle or EPUB for yourself. Gift the paperback or download the Audible book.)

Amazon (Paperback, Kindle, Audible)

Barnes & Noble (Paperback, Nook/EPUB)

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.