The Great Kisser
Stories
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A profoundly funny—and comically profound—story collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary American fiction
When his dying psychiatrist gives him the tapes to thirty years’ worth of therapy sessions, what else can Michael Goldberg do but listen? It is the story of his life, after all—never mind the fact that it’s narrated by a younger version of himself who has no idea what’s going to happen next.
Besides, as a man of letters best known for “My Mother Is Not Living,” the story that earned him a reputation as “the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer,” Michael has never been especially concerned with the niceties of literary convention. What he really wants, what he’s been looking for from New York to Hollywood and back again—from doomed high school romances to a late marriage begun in sin and overshadowed by tragedy, from boyhood days playing stickball in the streets of Queens to middle-aged afternoons behind a desk at the activist organization Jewish Punchers, sorting masses of data into one of two files: “Good for the Jews” or “Bad for the Jews”—are answers. To life’s great mysteries, sure, but mainly to the one question that always seems to be waiting for him, wherever he goes: How did I end up here?
What Michael discovers in his therapist’s tapes, and what David Evanier so masterfully portrays in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection, is a life that is no less inevitable for being unplanned, and no less extraordinary for being average.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author of several novels (including Red Love), biographies (Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin) and the story collection The One-Star Jew, Evanier exhibits mastery in this new collection of eight stories. They unfurl as the ongoing spiel of New York writer Michael Goldberg, tortured by feelings of inadequacy in love, family and work. In the opening "The Tapes," middle-aged Michael, an editor at Jewish Punchers, unblocks the story of his life after his highly unorthodox psychiatrist dies, leaving him a trove of their taped sessions. Michael scrolls back 25-plus years through his marriage to the chronically self-effacing, alcohol-sodden Karen, whom he met as a young mother (and whose older first husband killed himself after her affair with Michael). In subsequent stories, such as "Scraps," a younger Michael casts about for a sympathetic surrogate family, such as the parents of his high school love Rachel, whose eventual rejection sets the tone for his future relations with women. Later in life, Michael attends his ailing parents ("borderline lunatics") and, in the title story, learns that his jealous mother kept a doting diary of his childhood. Evanier's stories boil with a satisfying sense of rage, stoked by sharp observation.
