Considering Self-Publishing?

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 38

Here’s my book review of The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley.

Novelist Walter Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins crime stories and the feature film Devil in a Blue Dress. But The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn’t a whodunit. It’s artful, introspective literary fiction about a 91-year-old man near the end of his life.

Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.

When Sensia passed, he threw a tarp over everything in the bedroom and closed the door. He now sleeps on a mattress under a table in the kitchen. He rarely goes out, except when his grand-nephew Reggie walks him to the store for a few meager supplies. And he’s terrified to open the door for anyone.

The narrative is full of Ptolemy’s fretful thoughts. He has outlived almost all of his closest friends and loved ones. And early in this story, he finds that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting.
Another nephew, Hilly, drops by to take him to Reggie’s wake. There Ptolemy meets Robyn, a gorgeous, slender girl who is about to turn eighteen. She decides to take care of him, becoming his last love, albeit Platonic, but intense as any of the romances in his long life.

As Ptolemy says to her:  

I love you and I couldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you taking care of me. And if you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had better.

This may well be Walter Mosley’s best book.

(In 2013 actor Samuel L. Jackson said in an interview with Red Carpet News TV that he had acquired the movie rights to Ptolemy Grey. However, as of this writing, IMDBPro.com does not list the project.)

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. I’m the author of Mr. Ballpoint. Be sure to catch these podcasts at BoychikLit.com.

Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 37

Here’s my book review of  Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe.

If you’re in therapy or considering it, you may find this novel unsettling. It’s about Manhattan psychiatrist Dr. Estelle Berman, and two of her colleagues – middle-aged men identified only as Dr. H and Dr. Z. Most of the other characters in the book are their students or their patients. And all of these lives intersect and become entangled.

To some of her patients and even her friends, Dr. Berman can seem cold and calculating. She thinks of herself as wise and practical. All of the therapists in this story are trying improve the lives of their patients, who range from troubled to disturbed, many of them needing medication but not hospitalization.

There’s Justine, the gorgeous young movie star, who is anorexic and a kleptomaniac. There’s homely and lonely Anne, who fears she’s unlovable and gets coaxed out of the closet, only to be jilted. And the doctors refer their own children to each other for treatment. Dr. Z’s daughter Ronit is stressed because she can’t get pregnant, then Dr. Z is stressed about the possible complications when he finds out she’s carrying twins.

These are psychiatric case histories flavored with personal drama. We get insight into the mental processes and disorders of the patients, as well as those of their doctors. Because from Roiphe’s vantage point, all human minds are troubled. It’s just that some of us live with our demons better than others.

This is Anne Roiphe’s tenth novel, and she’s been described as a first-generation feminist. She’s also done nonfiction books and articles on family issues and mental health. She has an insider’s grasp of the psychiatric profession, and at times it’s not at all flattering.

Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind is a peek into the tangled psyches of a few intelligent people, most of them well-to-do and white, in today’s New York City. To paraphrase the narrator of the old TV series, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is just a few of them.” And whether outwardly healthy or visibly disturbed, each of us suffers daily from self-doubt, jealousy, rage, guilt, arrogance, fears, phobias, and nightmares.

This dark novel could make for a fascinating book report. But a summer beach read, it’s not.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones, the author of the humorous novel Farnsworth’s Revenge. Catch these podcasts at BoychikLit.com.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 32

Here’s my book review of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.

This novel is no less than an attempt to trace the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe over the last two centuries. Author Umberto Eco’s story is a partially true but barely believable plot behind the multiple versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a racist tract that inspired Naziism. Eco's account is narrated by the one character he admits to being fictional, Simonini, a master forger who made a living not only creating official documents but also fabricating the facts and stories they contained. The plot suggests that this man was hired to create the The Protocols as a deliberate hoax to incite hatred and build a political power base.

Eco has been a lifetime student of occultist movements and secret societies, including the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and various anti-clerical, anti-Papist, anti-royalist, anarchist, and, yes, anti-Semitic political and religious groups, including their agent provocateurs.

Behind this story is a general conclusion about the nature of conspiracy. In this web of loosely woven plots, conspiracy is not a masterfully directed and highly coordinated effort. It is, instead, a monstrous disease that has no direction other than its own propagation. It has no head and no permanently governing body. Spanning generations, it goes wherever it feeds best, and it serves whomever will feed and sustain it. It likewise destroys, not a specific enemy, but any person, group, or ideology the persecution of which will benefit, even for the short term, the feeders of conspiracy.

In short, it has been convenient for various groups at various times to promote hatred of marginalized social groups. But as Eco demonstrates, this agenda has  much more to do with consolidating power than with persecuting or exterminating the  victims.

Ultimately, it's about political expediency and rousing the emotions of the masses – not to destroy an enemy but to enrich their persecutors.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. I’m the author of Mr. Ballpoint. Catch these podcasts at boychiklit.com.

The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 31

Here’s my book review of The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber.

The protagonist of this novel is Chaz Wilmot, an accomplished fine arts painter. He’s a brilliant technician but insecure about his creativity. His insecurity is rooted in the emotional abuse he received from his father, who was also a famous painter and intensely jealous of his son.

Wilmot is also pretty much a failure at his personal relationships. He’s divorced two wives, and he’s not a particularly attentive father to his children. Then, a bizarre thing happens. Chaz volunteers as a patient in a pharmaceutical research study. He’s given a psychoactive drug that induces hallucinations. But in Chaz, the effect is unique and disturbing – he seems to bi-locate physically as well as mentally into another person’s body at another time in history. He finds himself living in Madrid in the 1650s having assumed the identity of Diego Velázquez, one of the most supremely gifted painters who ever lived.

In this past life, Chaz learns all of Velázquez’s techniques, one brushstroke at a time. Back in the present day, international criminals discover his talent and blackmail him into forging a Velasquez painting that has been missing for centuries.

I find two things remarkable about this book. First, perhaps because Gruber is married to a painter, his descriptions of painterly technique are vivid and detailed. It’s a short course in classical painting. Painters especially revere Velázquez’s Las Meninas (the Maids of Honor), which shows a little princess surrounded by her servants in the Spanish court. Pablo Picasso was so obsessed that he painted 58 versions of it. There are other renditions by renowned artists such as Dali, Degas, Goya, Sargent, and Whistler.

Also remarkable is the theme of altered mental states. As Chaz shuttles back and forth between the centuries, he begins to wonder – what is reality? What is personal identity? How can you be so sure you are the person you think you are?

And – what difference would it make if your favorite painting by an old master were just a masterful fake?

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My forthcoming novel about an art scandal in 1890s Paris is Bonfire of the Vanderbilts. Be sure to catch these podcasts at BoychikLit.com.

Bonfire of the Vanderbilts - Preview

The Baptism by Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Paris 1892 (LACMA)

Author Gerald Everett Jones reads from his forthcoming novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena.

Invisible by Paul Auster

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 28

Here’s my book review of Invisible by Paul Auster.

First off, there are many books with the title Invisible. Make sure you get the right one. Paul Auster writes fascinating literary novels, which are often baffling. This book presents three interwoven versions of the same story as told by three different narrators.

Main character Adam Walker is a young poet in New York. Soon after graduation he meets a worldly couple at a party – Frenchman Rudolph Born and his mistress Margot. Born is an international man of mystery, an unscrupulous character who may be con-man or spy or both. Margot is a seductress. Born helps Walker hook up with Margot, and the first plot complication is a love triangle.

Born pulls Walker into a publishing venture, and then – out of the blue – he murders a man in front of him on the street. He intimidates Walker into helping him cover it up.

Walker is now carrying a burden of guilt that will haunt him forever. When he thinks Born and Margot are out of his life, Walker has a love affair with his own sister. More guilt.

Walker tries to make sense of it all by writing an autobiographical novel. When circumstances prevent him from completing it, he challenges his friend Jim, who is also a writer, to finish the story. Jim then narrates the next part of the book, describing what he’s been able to discover about Walker’s past.

In a third narrative, a French woman named Cécile narrates. She was a minor character earlier in the story, but now she’s center stage. She met Walker by way of Born. She was in love with Walker and tormented by Born. Near the end of the book, she meets up with Born, and he tries to pull her into yet another of his traps.

The book ends on a final scene which seems to have no connection to Walker’s story. Like his protagonist Walker, Auster is a poet. It’s up to the reader to find meaning in this concluding image. This plot is complex and not easily understood. But Invisible isn’t a pulp-fiction whodunit. In the end, you probably don’t have all the facts, and the facts you do have, may not even be true.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. I’m the author of the humorous novel Mr. Ballpoint. And you can catch these podcasts at BoychikLit.com.

The Belief in Angels by J. Dylan Yates

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 26

Here’s my book review of The Belief in Angels by J. Dylan Yates.

In this novel there are two entwined stories about coping with survivor's guilt. Teenage Jules (her birthname was Julianne) and her grandfather Sam (given name, Szaja) have come through personal ordeals, she with a brilliant but an irresponsible and abusive mother, and he through the genocidal persecutions of eastern Europe in World War II. The cruelties visited on him were more overt and violent, but the psychological terror Jules must endure is just as real and emotionally damaging. Yates artfully shapes this book through meticulous detail crafted from the often mundane daily lives of these characters, along with their troubled and introspective thought processes.

Ultimately, it's a story about finding value and making meaning where there seems to be none. There are no redeeming visitations from angels, but in Jules, as in Sam, we get a glimpse of the higher self, the wise consciousness, that prevails in the human psyche.

So, The Belief in Angels may actually encourage your faith in people.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My humorous novel Christmas Karma is narrated by an angel who has a weird sense of humor. As the angel observes, the quickest way to invoke the laughter of the universe is to make plans – particularly devious ones. Be sure to catch these podcasts on BoychikLit.com.

'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 2 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides poses the question: “Does a love story that ends in marriage have any relevance today?” Time was, back in Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century Britain, whether the heroine snagged the man of her dreams made all the difference. He would be handsome, tender, and – best of all – rich. Doesn’t sound too P. C. does it? But that’s essentially the plot of chick-lit novels like Sex and the City.
 
In a man’s take on the subject, The Marriage Plot hinges on a love triangle first joined on a college campus. There’s a shy man who wants to help starving children, a neurotic woman who has a big heart, and a brilliant biochemist who has serious mental problems. Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on. Bad news for self-help gurus who are helping you make plans. Way to make God laugh.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. Read my hilarious new novel Mr.Ballpoint, and follow my rants at www.boychiklit.com.

From my longer review cross-posted on Goodreads.com:

The Marriage Plot is masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre "campus novel." That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

Then there's the theme of semiotics. I studied with Roland Barthes (yes, I'm that old) and back then I don't think the term semiotics even existed. At least, I don't recall his ever having used it. But he talked incessantly about structuralism, that a novel is a long sentence spoken by its author, a literary construct waiting to be parsed. Understand, I didn't get any of this from him back then, just from what others, including Susan Sontag, have written about him since. His lesson plan was built around Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," which is the engrossing tale of a man obsessed by an opera star who turns out to be both a castralto and the "kept woman" of a powerful priest. But why Barthes chose that story for his criticism totally escaped me at the time, and I can only surmise now what his intentions were.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There's a similar concept in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in which the narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous, because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgements, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost. (An astute Goodreads commentator observed that Eugenides was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace, a brilliant novelist who suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide.)

Book Review: Michael Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows

Fascinating, well-researched, masterfully crafted Shakespeare pseudo-history. Silly, overly complicated, implausible, downright infuriating potboiler whodunnit plot - but there's a method to this madness.
Gruber's The Book of Air and Shadows bears a lot of similarities to Dan Brown's literate mysteries. It's a rare-book scandal unraveled by following a skein of coded messages. In this case, the messages are 17th-century cryptography. The author seems to have a firm grasp on this arcane stuff, but I can't tell. He explains the techniques in detail, but I can't follow them. Then, I was one of those lazy students who skipped calculus because I had heard that it was hard. My loss, I'm sure.
The Shakespeare invented history is amazing and jaw-dropping. If you haven't read Bill Bryson's Shakespeare you might bring that along. Gruber even invents old documents written in Elizabethan argot. Like the cryptography material, these seem authentic, but I couldn't tell you.
Then there's the mystery plot. He gives us two protagonists - intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin and film freak Albert Crosetti, each of whom lusts after finding a long-lost, heretofore forgotten play of the Bard's - The Tragedy of Mary Queen of the Scots. This material would have been too hot politically for Shakespeare's time, which Gruber provides as both the reason it was written and the reason it had to be hidden. He does provide a synopsis, and of all the invented stuff in this book, this play is the most intriguing. It would have been one of the greatest dramatic pieces ever written, right up there with Macbeth.
This convoluted plot may cause you to pull out what's left of your hair. But just when you think it's insulted your intelligence one time too many, Gruber begins to hint at what he's doing. Miskin and Crosetti have a series of heated discussions about whether art imitates life or the other way around. Crosetti insists that movies, being our collective subconscious, provide models for all our social interactions. As it turns out, Gruber's plot is so unsatisfying because it both apes and defies movie formulas. The good guys do some awful things, make all the wrong decisions, and are not particularly admirable except in retrospect and apology. And the bad guys make Tarantino's stupid killers look smart.
So - I'll just say that the mystery plot is so badly crafted - and I believe deliberately so - that it more than proves its point.

Donna Tartt's Boychik

Main character Theodore Decker narrates Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch. He is very much the boychik, his story beginning when he is a naive but precocious early teen and then concluding when he is a world-weary young man in his mid twenties. This coming-of-age story is full of his personal introspection and psychological turmoil. It will be difficult to write about it without some spoilers, since the engine of the plot is his travails to overcome a life-changing traumatic event. So be warned.
Near the outset, Theo and his mother duck into a New York museum in the rain and are caught in a terrorist bomb blast. His mother is killed but he is one of the few survivors. Another fatality is a cultured old man named Welty, who was at the museum with his ward Pippa. The girl is close to Theo's age and also survives but with some debilitating injuries.
Before Welty expires next to Theo in the rubble of the blast, he gives him his signet ring and tells him to take the painting - The Goldfinch - with him to keep it safe. After Theo learns of his mother's death, he becomes a temporary ward of some rich friends, the Barbours of Park Avenue. He has no idea what to do with the painting, but decides to hide it and keep it a secret from everyone. The ring leads him eventually to Welty's antique-dealer business partner Hobie, who is now taking care of the wounded Pippa as she recovers from major surgery. For Theo, it was love at first sight with Pippa at the museum. Along with the painting, this love will become his obsession. Here is my first quibble with the book, and I have many, even though I think it is both masterful and well worth the reading. That is, as in some time-worn Jane Austen stiff-necked saga, Theo can never bring himself to tell Pippa he loves her. Years later, he will do it indirectly and not in person, and she will tell him he is dear to her but they are both too damaged to build a life together. It will take hundreds of pages to find that out, and sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Another troublesome issue is the first-person narration. As the book begins, it's difficult to believe that the teen narrator has such an extensive vocabulary, sophistication, and worldly experience. We find out later that the older version of Theo is telling the story, based on contemporaneous notes he made all along. The author's having to explain this point is cumbersome and awkward, and, as with other elements, disclosed much too late in the story to avoid some degree of aggravation in the reading. Another classic problem with first-person narration is, how do you resolve the plot? Especially if the narrator perishes, as it seems at various points he might, how will the reader get this information? Who will live to tell the tale? One method is to have one of the other characters step in late as narrator and say that he or she found the unfinished manuscript. This, too, can be a lame way to repair a structural mistake. Because I did suspect that Theo would survive his dark nights of the soul - and there are many, many of them - it all rings somewhat hollow that at no point did I fear he would actually die. My final complaint is that, after all kinds of momentous events and bumps and shocks along life's journey, Tartt devotes the last portion of the book to metaphysical agonizing. I thought I'd dropped into a lecture on Existentialism. This novel owes a lot to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, both of which it mentions. The underlying philosophical questions are worth investigating - Why is there evil in the world? What is the point of living? - but I could have wished they'd have been more organic to the narrative.

Book Review: "Black Cow" by Magdalena Ball

Friend and colleague Magdalena Ball sent me an (electronic) advance reading copy of her new novel Black Cow. Maggie is a contributor to the Boychik Lit blog (helping provide sensible sexual balance), and she is the founder and editor of the Compulsive Reader book review site. I previously reviewed her debut novel Sleep Before Evening, a painful coming-of-age story about a nice, bright girl (Marianne) from the Long Island suburbs who gets lost in the New York subculture of drugs and rock 'n roll. In Black Cow, the female protagonist (Freya) is all grown up, pushing middle age, settled down with her mildly dysfunctional family in Double Bay, one of the trendier suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Freya is married to the charismatic but now underperforming James. They are both busy striving to be capitalist overachievers after having long ago abandoned their youthful hippie ideals. Freya is a harried residential real estate agent. James is CEO of a nameless firm that seems to be engaged in nothing in particular. As a result of the global Great Recession malaise, Freya's house hunters aren't buying and James's shareholders are blaming him for, well, everything. Their teenage children Cameron and Dylan, once sweet and precocious, have turned cynical and introverted. No one is getting any satisfaction.

Freya's family reminds me of Katie's in Nick Hornby's  How to be Good, and it's almost the stereotype of middle class home life these days, the nuclear family of reality TV and sitcoms alike. It's somewhat depressing to realize that life is so much the same from Bloomsbury to Darien to Santa Monica to Double Bay. Ho hum. What to do?

Freya and James decide, after a long sequence of mishaps and arguments, to sell out, move the family to rural Tasmania, and take up organic farming and cattle ranching.

In so many novels, perhaps because of the authors' strong desires that blockbuster movies get made from them, some horrific, extraordinary event suddenly disrupts the mundane flow, triggering a hell-bent plot. An example would be Ian McEwan's Saturday, in which the daily middle-class routine of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is upset when a terrorist breaks into his home.

Although Black Cow is full of the aforesaid mishaps and arguments, it lacks that exceptional, catastrophic inciting incident that would transform it into a horror story or a family adventure movie. Assuredly, shit happens. But you may find Freya's dilemmas no worse or more dramatic than you experienced in your own dysfunctional family last week. This lack, in my opinion, is to the book's great credit. Black Cow is to be commended for its realism and its honesty. It's not a thrill ride, not an entertainment to divert us momentarily from the challenges of daily living, but a meditation on how life should be lived, on what we value and what we don't.

Having at least two meanings, the title suggests a theme.  The first is a confection made from root beer and ice cream. It's the treat Freya used to offer Cameron and Dylan when they were younger, the one sure-fire way of bringing a smile, a trick that no longer works. The term also refers to the Tasmanian Wagyu, a breed of black cattle prized for its marbled beef.

Those two meanings book-end the story.

So, does chucking it all and moving to the country resolve the family's unhappy issues? Remember, I praised Maggie for her unflinching realism.

All this said, they could well make a movie out of Black Cow, and I'd buy a ticket.

Book Review: "Sleep Before Evening" by Magdalena Ball

Maggie Ball is a guest poster on this site, and I hope she noticed the hazing that our colleague Craig Alan Williamson got on these pages for his “college comedy.” Welcome to the boys’ club, Maggie. But we were expecting you to bring the fun and games. Instead, we get grief, from a woman who is both a looker and a thinker.

Chick lit, it’s not, convenient as that would have been for the sake of contrast to the boychik variety. No, what we have here is a full-on rush of ambitious literary fiction. That it largely succeeds as such is no consolation to horny but bookish males hoping for a bit of fluff or a few chuckles while killing time in the airport departure lounge.

Her central character, seventeen-year-old Marianne Cotton, doesn’t have a problem—she has onion-like layers of them—each drawing its quota of weeping as it is rudely stripped off to reveal more of the same beneath. And she seemed like such a nice, bright girl from the burbs, most likely to succeed, even if she’s headed for the success-starved achievements of the liberal arts.

It all starts when Marianne’s godlike grandfather, who is her chess master and father-substitute, croaks. No clean death, this. He suffers a devastating stroke (as she watches) and lingers on painlessly (for him) until his tormented daughter (Marianne’s mother Lily) decides to pull the plug. Except she doesn’t bother to ask Marianne. That’s major life crisis number one (unless you count the time her natural father took a hike when she was three).

To this point, Marianne has been an A-student out on politely competitive Long Island, bound for NYU with a scholarship and earnest plans to major in music. (Grandpa was fond of quoting Wittgenstein to her, so we guess she will also minor in philosophy with no strain.)

Propelled by her grief over the loss of the only sane man in her life, Marianne goes into socioeconomic free-fall. It seems all she has to do is set foot on the Long Island Railroad and inevitably she’s spiraling down into the rock music and drug culture of lower Manhattan. A creepy-sexy harmonica player named Miles is her undoing, and he does a helluva job, deflowering her and getting her hooked on horse, not necessarily in that order (or maybe simultaneously—she doesn’t seem to notice or care).

Life as a junkie and a wannabe groupie isn’t glamorous or fun, although at times Marianne seems to think it’s all she deserves. She delights in high-life sex with Miles, although unfortunately for voyeuristic male readers, we have to take her word for it—there’s no graphic content here.

What follows for much of the book is a whipsawing of agony and ecstasy as Marianne struggles to scrape up enough cash to cop and occasionally also eat. Bukowski comes to mind—no glamorous existence there, either. (Some practitioners of fratire don’t seem to grasp this, fascinated as they seem to be with the puke on their own shoes. Ah, well.)

Oh, it’s an artful whipsawing, in that the narrative respects the rhythms of the reader’s expectations. Just when we think Marianne will get smart and win back some self respect, she gets knocked down, someone dies, she gets a bad dose, she catches her boyfriend in flagrante with the band hag, and so on. (Fiction isn’t life. In its contrived worlds, as in the movies, people rise, suffer, and die on cue, even to a beat. It has to be that way—art is artifice, after all.)

Just when Marianne has been beaten to a bloody pulp, she winds up in rehab, and there begins the arduous climb back toward reconciliation with her mother and the middle class. Late in the book as she starts to spill it in psychotherapy, we begin to appreciate (as she does) what precipitated her fall. Up until now, she’s blamed the inept other men in her life—her father and her mother’s subsequent string of loser lovers, along with the infamous Miles and an all-male cast of criminals, dope dealers, and sleazy employers.

But here comes the epiphany: All along she’s been disappointed by the lack of love and attention from her mother, a self-absorbed painter with a manic-depressive lifestyle. Marianne’s image of herself has been reflected through her mother’s neuroses, and they both have to get through, and past, that core issue.

So, relax, guys. You may be crass, sleazy, opportunistic, and inept. But you’re not at fault.

This time, you'll have to let the women work it out.