The Best a Man Can Get
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A hilarious and touching debut novel in the seriocomic Nick Hornby tradition.
Michael Adams is a composer of advertising jingles who shares a bachelor pad with three other guys. He spends his days lying in bed (a minifridge positioned perfectly within reach) and playing trivia games with his underachieving roommates. And when he feels like it, Michael crosses the city and returns home to his unsuspecting wife and two small children. Michael is living a double life, stretching out his wilting salad days with imaginary business trips and fake deadlines while his wife enjoys the exhausting misery of the little ones. It’s the best thing for his marriage, Michael figures. She can care for the new loves of her life as it seems only she knows how, and he can sleep until the afternoon. Can this double life continue indefinitely? In The Best a Man Can Get, best-selling comic novelist John O’Farrell takes readers on a dark romp through the soul of the contemporary male, torn between eternal adolescence and the very real demands of fatherhood. It’s wry, witty, and surprisingly charming.
“Sharp-witted slapstick.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Are the wife and kids getting you down, taking up too much of your leisure time, disturbing your beauty rest? Pretend you're single, rent an apartment and sleep there instead. O'Farrell's (Things Can Only Get Better) has great fun with his monstrous premise in this sharp-witted slapstick set in London. Jingle writer Mike Adams, 32, is a perplexed father of two, shocked to learn that his wife, Catherine, is pregnant again. Knowing he may never realize his dream of being a rock musician, Mike justifies his double life renting an apartment in Balham with college student Jim, porn addict Simon and shy Paul by stressing that his long separations from Catherine solidify their marriage by keeping Mike sane. Catherine believes Mike is really renting a music studio and pulling all-nighters to compose his commercial jingles. Holes develop in Mike's story as he retreats further into his beer-soaked pseudo-bachelorhood, stops payments on the family home in Kentish Town and is tempted by nymphet Kate. Clever psychological riffs Mike feels he is becoming a father figure to Jim, Simon and Paul abound between chaotic parenting and apartment scenes as Mike fears he is emulating his own father, who walked out when Mike was just five. Denial turns to despair when Catherine bursts Mike's bubble, saying she is unhappy that he works so much, leaving her alone to raise the children. As the dark shadows of divorce, financial ruin and creative failure stalk Mike, O'Farrell succeeds in creating a hit single for the Nick Hornby crowd.
