No More Mr. Nice Guy
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. But now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing for it -- Frank has to go.
But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been in heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex. treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate--he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Published in England in 1998 but only now reaching the U.S., Jacobson's novel immediately plunges the reader into the rising discord between Frank, an award-winning TV critic, and his partner, Melissa, author of "feministical-erotic novels," as Frank puts it. When Mel gives him the boot, Frank, at 50, hits the road to reconnect with old friends. In Cambridge, his once successful art dealer buddy has lost everything: "Business in trouble. Marriage kaput. Relations with offspring deeply flawed." In Gloucester, another is having an affair with his married ex-wife (an ex-lover of Frank's, as it happens). In Little Cleverley, Frank seeks out Clarice, the fulcrum of a threesome he and Melissa once had. Along the way he meets a zaftig female standup comic and ends up, incongruously, in a religious retreat, where he's given some unorthodox advice from an ex-abbot. Reminiscent of Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler at their most trenchantly vulgar, Jacobson, who won the Man Booker for The Finkler Question, writes like a Jewish Evelyn Waugh. Laugh-out-loud observations abound, but the grating Frank may test readers' patience as he meanders through his sexually disordered life.
