Funny Girl by Nick Hornby

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 24

Here’s my book review of Funny Girl by Nick Hornby.
British novelist Nick Hornby is best known for his books that have been adapted as movies and television series, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down. Many of his humorous novels fall into the genre they call in the UK “lad lit,” and I’ve called boychik lit, about young men on the make. Funny Girl is a departure. It’s about a young woman who is less concerned about men than becoming a comedienne on TV. Her role model is Lucille Ball and after her arrival in London from the sticks she takes the stage name Sophie Straw – Sophie for sophisticated and straw for brassy blonde.
Sophie fails rapidly upward and is soon the star of a new BBC sitcom. It’s the 1960s – in the midst of the so-called sexual revolution. Yes, Funny Girl is about Sophie’s personal relationships and those of her mostly male colleagues. But it’s mostly about how hard it is to generate comedy, week after week. Funny Girl is sharply witty, and not so much funny as touching.
The writers, Tony and Bill, fret continually about what’s funny. And their gags run the gamut from potty humor to mature marital spats.
So, Funny Girl is not lad lit at all. And it’s not so much funny as witty, which shows up in the catty dialogue as Sophie and the guys argue over script notes, social gaffes, and their personal heartaches.
Nick Hornby describes his writing process this way: “I write in horrible little two-and-three sentence bursts, with five-minute breaks in between. It’s all pretty grim! And so dull!”
It’s routine, all right. The best writing advice I ever got was to get into a chair every day. But clearly Hornby is doing a good job of entertaining himself and us. I suspect that’s why he keeps going  back to his chair.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My series of boychik lit books is the Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill, and the most recent installment is titled, Farnsworth’s Revenge. Young men may identify, mature men will remember, and women of any age will delight in seeing poor Rollo go splat. Don’t forget to catch these podcasts at Boychiklit.com.

"The Long Lavender Look" by John D. MacDonald

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 18

Here’s my book review of The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald.

Time was, I was a big fan of MacDonald (he was still alive then). I believe I read all of his Travis McGee books, of which this is one. Each has a color in the title. The power of this mystery series is in the genre and the attitude – dirty dealings and benign cynicism.

Trav lives on a houseboat he won in a poker game in Fort Lauderdale. He’s a salvage expert – he goes after missing boats, money, or wives. He always keeps half of whatever he finds. The baddest guys try to stop him, because they covet the same things.

Trav is a very 'Sixties hero, with parallels to James Bond. Like Bond, McGee is a garbage-collector of the vile detritus left behind by the world's evil geniuses and idiotic criminals. And also like Bond, Trav treats women badly and assumes they like it. And, as in the Bond stories, the beautiful women he loves too much end up dead, usually horribly so, at the hands of the elusive monster-du-jour. Revenge then adds to his justification for giving back as bad as his girlie got, or worse.

As an education in the underside of Florida real-estate schemes and political corruption, MacDonald's books are fascinating, unexpected discoveries. You also get a strong dose of macroeconomic theory anytime McGee engages his neighbor Meyer Meyer to help him understand the intricacies of bribing politicians or laundering money.

But what strikes me as I pick up this book again is the depth of the cruelty MacDonald conjures. It's really ugly, voyeuristic, more shocking than the scummiest story in today's news. But if it thrills you to see powerful bad guys bite the dirt, Travis McGee is your man.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. My recent book for male audiences is Mr. Ballpoint, about an outrageous huckster and his mild mannered son, whose marketing of the first ballpoint pen triggered the wacky Pen Wars of 1945. It’s a humorous tale about the joys of entrepreneurship, and the bad guys don’t bite the dirt – they drown in their own red ink. Mr. Ballpoint, capitalism can be fun. Oh, and be sure to catch these podcasts on BoychikLit.com.

"The Mackerel Plaza" by Peter De Vries

Boychik Lit Book Review - No. 15

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.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. I think you’ll enjoy my new humorous novel Christmas Karma about the travails of a dysfunctional family around the holidays, narrated by an angel who has a wicked sense of humor. Main character Willa Nawicki is bewildered by a series of curious karmic events that literally ring her doorbell during the frantic season, awakening years-old resentments and stimulating ever-more-intense personal confrontations. These bizarre visitations include a grizzled old man claiming to be her father, who has been missing for some thirty years but now says the title to the family home is in his name – and now he wants the place back.

As the angel observes, “The surest way to invoke the laughter of the universe is to make plans, particularly devious ones.”.

Christmas Karma would make a great gift for yourself or anyone tends to get the blues this time of year.

And be sure to catch these podcasts on BoychikLit.com.

"President Me" by Adam Carolla

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 12

Here’s my book review of President Me: The America That’s in My Head by Adam Carolla.
It’s no surprise that this book is a collection of rants. It’s his take on public policy, but the issues are simply his everyday annoyances. With his wisecracking talent, he magnifies these trivial snits into national crises that require the attention of the chief executive. Read his problems and his commonsense solutions, and you’ll find a kindred complainer.
Airport security hassles the innocent, especially the weary business traveler. The few restaurants that serve coleslaw as an alternative to French fries screw it up by adding golden raisins. Women need a perfume that smells like WD-40.
Ultimately, the cause of each and every problem is government over-regulation – and the fact that too many Americans are running around overdosed on caffeine.
Speaking of caffeine and political theory, on a recent podcast, Carolla confessed that he was chatting up a respected pundit while he waited in line at the local coffee bar. His secret advisor? None other than – Dennis Praeger.
Conspiracy theorists, take note.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. Read my humorous novel about wacky capitalists, Mr. Ballpoint, and catch these podcasts on Boychik Lit.com.

"The Woody" by Peter Lefcourt

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 8 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles

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.
For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. If you like political satire, try my novel Farnsworth’s Revenge. And you can catch these audio book reviews on BoychikLit.com.
Cross-posted to Goodreads.com.

Sneak Preview of Farnsworth's Revenge (Kindle version) Starting Today

Kilroy was here.

Link to the sneak: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IIE1R5C


It's exhausting being on the bleeding edge because, duh, you bleed. To make matters worse, I'm working in a gray area, and it's difficult to find my way in all this fog.
You could say I'm a self-publisher, but my imprint LaPuerta has published several titles, including some by other authors. And we've also packaged books and even entire series for other publishers. So, as I say, I'm tooling along in the gray area, not ready to play among the big boys but not exactly flogging my first memoir.
One of the many paradoxes of the legacy publishing world is the long lead time required by the media if you want to garner advance reviews for a new release. This traditional model used to apply mainly to hardcover books, then shifted to trade paperback as costs of printing and returns shot up. It's possible for an ebook to have a delayed release, but you see this mostly when it's in coordination with paper book versions. If a book release is ebook only (as I notice Dan Poynter now advising), the market seems to favor "instant" publishing and reviews after the fact. Book-review bloggers and podcast hosts, for example, rarely insist on receiving advance copies. Yes, it may take them four to six weeks to publish a review, but they don't expect you to withhold publication during that time.
Bookstore readings? Great for the author's ego but not a very efficient way to build an audience. I've taken bookstore readings I've done and uploaded them as MP3 clips to SoundCloud, then posted them on my Facebook fan page. Doing appearances that way has not cost me airfare and fretful nights in no-surprise hotels. (I'm curious about blog tours but haven't ventured out, as yet.)
So now I'm publishing my third Rollo Hemphill misadventure Farnsworth's Revenge after promising it to bookstore  audiences since about 2007. (This one rounds out the series, and you don't need to have read the first two.) I decided on a conventional trade paperback release with the customary advance review cycle. So even though the paperback was production-ready back in November, I set the release date at April Fool's Day.
Meanwhile I did a 20-copy Goodreads Giveaway program just before Christmas. More than 500 people entered the drawing, and of those more than 200 marked the book as "to-read."
It seemed a shame to make those sweet folks wait so long. So I'm borrowing from Hollywood and staging a sneak Kindle preview to my thousand closest friends.
So as of today, and for about a week, anyone reading this can grab a prepublication full-text Kindle version of Farnsworth's Revenge on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IIE1R5C
No waiting  -  but to keep faith with our press releases, the ebook will disappear in a few days, only to re-emerge after the paperback release date in early April.

READER ADVISORY: Among other nefarious elements of the plot, Farnsworth's Revenge reveals certain secrets of cold fusion. You'd better click through to get it now. You might not remember to do it tomorrow, and you never know when the Secret Government may shut us down.

Fratire (Frat-boy Satire) Is So Yesterday

It's difficult to discuss this topic because so few people know the term fratire, and still fewer apparently think it deserves any attention at all. The term fratire, derived from "fraternity satire," was coined by New York Times book reviewer Warren St. John after his editor informed him that calling the as-yet unlabeled literary genre "dick lit" was not fit to print. St. John was working at the time on a piece that surveyed the landscape of male-audience relationship fiction. That literary vista seemed unaccountably barren in comparison with the highly populated shelves of the female-audience counterpart, chick lit.
Too bad for the sake of the publishing industry that this anonymous editor made that call. When you have to explain what's behind a brand name, it's not a brand at all. Fratire was a murky concept, and a too-narrow focus. Dick lit, on the other hand, might have gained some traction in popular culture, while also having legitimate roots in Freudian theory (phallic narcissism). And it would have a time-honored literary tradition, albeit with a new label. To explore phallic narcissism, read just about any book by Philip Roth. In this genre, Portnoy's Complaint is a, uh, seminal work.
By the way, it's no use discussing the lame terms guy lit and lad lit. No one knows what they mean. And geek lit is a much larger tent - basically populated with anyone who'd go willingly to Comic-Con.
The poster-boy author for the emergent fratire genre was Tucker Max, whose collection of short stories, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, took his college-age readership by storm. The success of the book inspired a movie, which proved to have exactly zero appeal with general audiences. About the same time, Chuck Palahniuk's Choke was also rendered on film, and it, too, disappeared from theaters quickly. The wizards of Hollywood probably rightly concluded that fratire, or anything like it, would never grow legs. A few years before, Palahniuk's Fight Club had proved a remarkable exception. But that story was not so much about relationships as about the more traditional movie fare of watching reckless, desperate men duking it out. Oddly enough for the purpose of defining literary genres, Fight Club was also something of an exception to Palahniuk's recurring themes in his other books, which have more to do with the puzzles of heterosexual relationships. But that movie, more than any of his books, established his cult popularity. An image of him on his website shows him with a black eye and a bandage over the bridge of his nose, an obvious reference to the enduring popularity of his more belligerent material. And he's announced he'll do a Fight Club sequel.
Two recent articles report the retreat of Tucker Max from the literary stage, along with the predictable pronouncements of the demise of fratire: New York magazine announced "Notorious Frat Douche Tucker Max Is an Angel Investor Now," and ezine Jezebel continues the thread with "Tucker Max Is Now an Investor, Doesn't Care for Hookup Apps."
In my view, there was never anything all that interesting about fratire. I once called it "puke-on-your-shoes journalism." And when Max's stories weren't literally studying his vomit after binge drinking, they were about planning or attempting or succeeding at date rape - or passing out beforehand.
The theme of Max's stories, as well as the popular reception he received on campus-tour interviews, seemed to be that women just want to be dominated. His message to young men seemed to be, "Man up and get it done." And to women, "Cut the crap and admit you're all sluts at heart."
And it won't come as any surprise that this approach was deliberately and calculatingly offensive. After all, it takes a lot to shock audiences these days, and Max pulled it off, for awhile.
On the chick lit side of the ledger, the long-playing popularity of Bridget Jones's Diary, Sex and the City, and The Devil Wears Prada - all of which have been made into wildly successful movies - would seem to indicate that women, unlike men, are eager to analyze their relationship troubles. However, notably absent from the conversation is how sexist the chick-lit genre is. Helen Fielding has admitted that she modeled Bridget Jones's Diary on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The engine of that early 19th century plot is that an educated and refined - but disenfranchised - woman had only one hope of social success - to marry a wealthy nobleman. In Sex and the City, that engine is still purring right along. Carrie Bradshaw thinks she's liberated and self-actualizing. She's a self-supporting journalist and book author, after all. But the engine of her story is all about deciding on a role model for herself. She has three close female friends - each of which has coped with the plight of being single and female in a different way. One is a traditionalist, one a single-mom professional, and one a libertine. Carrie ends up landing and marrying Big, a macho wizard of Wall Street who can give her the social standing she craves. It seems that, despite the measure of success she has enjoyed on her own, she knows she will never go zinging about the globe on private jets and be invited to palatial estates unless she welds herself to such a benefactor.
Even more appalling in terms of its sexism and blatant misogyny is Fifty Shades of Grey. This story  retools The Story of O, a cult novel of the 1950s, which was itself a thinly disguised retelling of the exploits of the Marquis de Sade, whose name inspired the term sadism.
And what's the theme of Fifty Shades of Grey? Women just want to be dominated.
Perhaps it's that women at times like to fantasize about being dominated, about how their lives might be different if they'd found Mr. Big, or about what it might be like to have a new luxury of choice in life direction and relationships.
And perhaps also these urges are no more grounded in reality than my wanting to confront the guy next door and pound his face in. (Which I don't, Rock. Honest!)
I coined the term boychik lit to describe a male-oriented genre that, like chick lit, puzzles about relationships, but from the first-person point of view of a young man. I invented a main character, Rollo Hemphill, a geek who fails continually upward. He is puzzled not only by his success but also by how little that success has to do with the happiness of his relationships.
It may be that boychik lit is as unfortunate a choice of labels as fratire was. Some portion of my audience, not so used to Yiddishisms, might think a boychik is some kind of cross-dresser or transvestite. I really have nothing to say to them. I bet they don't read much.
Again, a brand name that has to be explained is probably no brand at all.
But I did make the effort. And I think an ongoing discussion about what type of satirical fiction might appeal to men should survive the justifiable demise of fratire.
Let's face it, young women - generally, but not always - seek relationships, and young men seek sex partners. So boychik lit is about a young man on the make. But in its audience are also mature men who want to remember what it was like to be in the marketplace, as well as women of any age who can't help being amused by how foolish all men are.
RIP, you authors of fratire. But I fear that, like the newly popular characters of zombie-lit, you won't stay buried. ~ ~ ~

Goodreads Giveaway Surprises

Five hundred and ten Goodreads.com fans competed for 20 advance review copies of the third Rollo Hemphill misadventure, Farnsworth's Revenge, which will be released in softcover on April Fool's Day of next year.

The one-month-long contest period closed today, and copies have already been ordered from the printer to ship direct to the winners. Goodreads advises them to allow 6-8 weeks for delivery, but I suspect it will be much sooner, although perhaps not in time for Christmas, given the holiday schedule at the printing plant and the vagaries of the shipping services.

This promotion was cross-posted multiple times on my Facebook author's page [Gerald Everett Jones - Author has some 120 likes]. The new FB Boost tool was used to sponsor wider posting, which about 15,000 users saw.

Amazing to me, among the 20 winners there are only two men. And one of them is a good friend of mine! I can only guess that he prevailed because he was the first entrant. At least, I suspect he was.

Are all of those other successful bidders mothers or wives or sisters of boychiks and intending to gift the book? Or are women my hardcore fans? I have no idea.

Four of the winners are women in England - not Scotland, and not Wales, my ancestral home. (Where were you guys?. Out tending sheep perhaps.)

Two women with identical ethnic last names with distinctive spelling won, living at some considerable geographic distance from each other. Sisters? Are the fans of Rollo a secret sisterhood? Wow, cold chills!

Only the reviews will tell.

If you entered but didn't win, take heart. You may not have to wait until April for your gratification. I believe the publisher is planning some sneak previews, however fleeting and brief.

Farnsworth's Revenge - Advance Reading Copy Giveaway on Goodreads

The release date for the trade paperback of Farnsworth's Revenge seems so far away - April Fool's Day next year. The first of Rollo's misadventures, My Inflatable Friend, came out on the same date, 2007. But especially if you read that one and its sequel Rubber Babes, you'll want to know how the trilogy gets resolved (and it does, with a wrenching twist, of course).

The Kindle edition of My Inflatable Friend is now .99 on Amazon for a limited time.

The Goodreads contest ends the week before Christmas, and the twenty winners should have their books by New Year's. Winners are encouraged to write and post reviews, and inclusion of spoilers will be a matter of personal conscience.

"Seeing poor Rollo go splat, it hurts so good when I laugh," Tom Blake, Orange County Register.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Farnsworth's Revenge

by Gerald Everett Jones

Giveaway ends December 17, 2013.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Farnsworth's Revenge has a fair amount of backstory, so you don't necessarily need to read the books in order. But then, if you're a binge watcher of Entourage or House of Cards, you'll want to begin at the beginning, with My Inflatable Friend, in which Rollo's outlandish schemes first take (bodily) form.


And then you'll be curious to know how Rollo manages to fail continually upward in Rubber Babes.

More Lame-Guy Humor

Video credit: skitguys.com

I wasn't feeling so bad about myself until the very end of this clip. I am not someone who agonizes over card selections, but then I'm always adding my personal messages to tailor the printed greeting to the recipient, the occasion, and, yes, my sense of her state of mind. But I would never expect scoring with a great card choice to buy me more game-viewing time.

She knows I don't watch those games, and if I said I was headed over to a friend's house to do that, she would be rightfully suspicious.

Now if I said, "Bye, off to the library," no questions asked.

If I said, "Off to the gym," she'd be skeptical, but she'd say "Good!" on the chance I might just be telling the truth. (Hint, guys: It's not that difficult to check a gym bag for sweaty clothes. Another reason not to wash them that often.)

Was this embarrassing to admit? What do you think?  Well, boychik, if you feel like confessing, there's plenty of Comment space.

Just Released on Kindle Select

Six short stories and an essay on this not-so-serious topic.

"Chemistry" expands on the self-evident premise that you can't tell teenagers anything. The narrator of "Not Quite After Lisette is a forty-something high-tech executive whose wife is divorcing him. "Johnny Halo and Rock, the Tyro Shock Jock" is the first of three episodes from the Rollo Hemphill series of comic novels. In this installment, he falls upward into a job as a shock-jock deejay. "In the Valley of the Happy People" is from the second book, Rubber Babes, and "Spin Cycle" is a chapter from the third book, Farnsworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. "In the Gallery of American Art" is a story about a woman who wakes up on her birthday thinking her life is perfect. And of course it's not. It is excerpted from the novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts, a work in progress. The afterward essay "Boychik Lit" is a think piece on male-centered comic fiction.

It's available from Kindle Select for $2.99. Always free to Amazon Prime members.

Wodehouse Is Papa of the Boychik

P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories,
and a whole lot more. (Image from The Guardian)

Right Ho, Jeeves should be a mandatory course of remedial study for modern fratirists, as well as would-be authors of boychik lit or any male-centered comic fiction.

I hereby enter the name of P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse into nomination for Papa of boychik lit, the humor genre about young men with more chutzpah than brains. Bertie Wooster, protagonist of the wacky Right Ho, Jeeves and other stories, most certainly fits that bill.

Notice I'm not proposing that Wodehouse is somehow the godfather of fratire. The genre of fraternity satire, as columnist Warren St. John first defined it, centers on college-age bad boys who are preoccupied almost totally with scoring, or sexual conquests numerically touted. Its most notorious practitioner has been Tucker Max. My point, if you can find one in this thoughtful essay, is that Wodehouse has what fratirists lack and what boychik authors should emulate - namely, a hipper sensibility. Class. What Bertie Wooster would call "the real Tabasco."

The "Papa" of twentieth-century literature, of course, was Ernest Hemingway. His biographer Carlos Baker says the nickname had something to do with his wanting to be regarded as an authority. And indeed Papa H was the high priest of clean, modernist writing style, the fabricator of sentences that slip out as effortlessly as a good bowel movement. As I've said in other posts and rants, his was an estimable contribution as to nonfiction, and particularly journalism. But to the extent that he killed style in narrative fiction, the ghosts of Peter Benchley and Heywood Hale Broun are still reviling him at some great Round Table in the etheric realms.

Also at that table, and possibly chairing it, would be Wodehouse, cackling as he explains how prose should come in other flavors besides vanilla. Note to Ben and Jerry: How about "Boychik's Banana"?

My comic novels about boychik Rollo Hemphill have attempted a world view inspired by the Wooster ethos: Avoid responsibility, romantic entanglements, and financial conundrums. Fear marriage and anyone in uniform. Pursue amusement, particularly if a practical joke will end in a "good wheeze." Fraternize with like-minded adult males who, despite their social standing, aspire to remain boys. Encourage food fights, but only with dinner rolls so as not to create a mess for which responsibility would have to be assumed. Coordinate rugby scrums in the clubroom, but only if fragile crockery has first been cleared. Solving real-world problems (such as romantic entanglements) by way of practical jokes and stratagems might not work but it's always worth a try.