THE DEADLY DREAMS PAGE: NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU, chasing dreams goes bad & AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT, chasing the bad dreams

AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT
JOHN VERCHER
Soho Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A harrowing and spellbinding story about family, the complications of mixed-race relationships, misplaced loyalties, and the price athletes pay to entertain—from the critically acclaimed author of Three-Fifths

Xavier "Scarecrow" Wallace, a mixed-race MMA fighter on the wrong side of thirty, is facing the fight of his life. Xavier is losing his battle with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), or pugilistic dementia—a struggle he can no longer deny. Through the fog of memory loss, migraines, and paranoia, Xavier does his best to keep in shape while he waits for the call that will reinstate him after a year-long suspension.

Until then, he watches his diet and trains every day at the Philadelphia gym owned by his cousin-cum-manager, Shot, a retired champion boxer to whom Xavier owes an unpayable debt. Xavier makes ends meet by teaching youth classes at Shot’s gym and by living rent-free in the house of his white father, whom Xavier has been forced to commit to a nursing home because of the progress of his end-stage Alzheimer’s. Dementia has revealed a shocking truth about Sam Wallace, and Xavier finally gains insight into why his Black mother left the family when Xavier was young.

As Xavier battles his aging body and his failing brain, each day is filled with challenges and setbacks. Then Xavier is offered a chance at redemption: a last-minute comeback fight in the largest MMA promotion. If he can get himself back in the game, he’ll be able to clear his name and begin to pay off Shot. But with his memory in shreds and his life crumbling around him, can Xavier hold onto the focus he needs to survive? After the Lights Go Out is a haunting, unflinching look at the aftermath of a career in MMA—as Xavier forgets everything around him, you'll want to remember every single word.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: This is one rough ride of a book. There are people whose road through life is not paved, has many potholes, throws up gravel and clouds of caliche dust as their bald-tired forty-year-old chassis bounces and shakes over to one ditch, down into another. And that is who we're with here. Xavier is not, was never, expecting a limo ride, not even waiting for a cab ride...he's still rollin' but the roll is slow and it's not getting faster.

The bad marriage he came from was made worse by its permanent poison-gift to him. His mother was Black and father white, so he knows something a lot of people don't have to: Not belonging to either side in a war isn't being neutral. That's a gift only those with a clear side, one that can't be denied, are given. He's mixed. He's mixed up, he's mixed it up in fights his whole life. No one wanted him on their team so he used what strength and speed he could find to go one-on-one with other rage-filled testosterone-poisoned Others.

Now nearing forty, he's sure he's got no future. So is everyone else but they never thought he had a present. His efforts to get one more headline bout in Mixed Martial Arts are, as we meet him, wavering in and out of existence in front of eyes that don't connect to his brain right anymore. The voices he hears clearest are the ones in his battered head, they aren't competing with tinnitus. At least they aren't the ones telling him things he doesn't want to hear...his father, foundering under Alzheimer's disease's heavy burdens, doesn't remember him but does remember how to hate, his chances to fight again, more, are steadily melting away and there's nothing else he can do to make a living.

The life of someone always on the margins is, realistically, never going to turn into a happily ever after. Xavier never once thought it would. He chooses his own adventure, like he always has, right up to the last bitter dreg from the cup.

Author Vercher tells this deeply moving, unbearably honest story in direct, immediate prose. He selects the small images...a texting app's continuation icon of dots keeping him on tenterhooks about his future, the feeling of hanging his hand out the window while driving his dad's old car bringing back the times he did the same thing as a kid...that make Xavier real. That keep him, however fleetingly, locked in to the present moment. They work very well, are sharp but still small enough to make them fit right on everyone.

What isn't quite as smooth is the passages where Xavier is learning his mother and father, very late in life from my point of view, are fully human people. What Author Vercher does to make Xavier aware of his mother's full humanity was a scene both a little long as well as underdeveloped. It needed not to feel rushed as Xavier learns Evelyn was a very different person than the mother he had. The issues around dementia were handled very well, in my experienced opinion. When Xavier realizes that disinhibition is part of the course of dementia, it rocks his world. It did not need to be played out in the over-the-top manner that it was. Honestly, the choice to make Xavier's pathology so very foregrounded wore on my patience at times. Every reader has their own crotchets...these are mine.

Perfection not being of this Earth, I can honestly say that your Yule gift cards, spent on this deep and emotionally honest journey, will not be wasted. This second novel tells me that Author Vercher is a gift to the readers who want to get into a story and come out changed.

Bravo, good sir.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

NO ONE LEFT TO COME LOOKING FOR YOU
SAM LIPSYTE
Simon & Schuster
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. **see content warnings**

My Review: Coming home to my era of Manhattan living in this story was a pleasure. It has Author Lipsyte's requisite snarky, biting wit. It felt like I was back in the after-hours club post-Save the Robots listening to the coke-fueled motormouthing. Oh my...I've said too much.

But it's true, this is the way it felt, and looked, and even smelled.

What I think makes this a good read, then, is its way of being in harmony with my own memories. It's an evocation of a vanished time and place. So how will it hit someone whose memories aren't like mine?

Right on the funny bone.

Later, we go get a drink at the Jew-Hater's bar.

The merry old pogromist, with his lovely shock of alabaster hair and craggy fascist visage, pours us free shots with our beers. Maybe he means to lubricate his audience.

"The Yids, they cut the penis," he says, casual, as though relaying news of an off-season baseball trade. ... "God makes people perfect. The penis, perfect. Why cut it up? Only the Yid thinks of that."

The bland face of evil, played for a few yuks...if you're going to work as this book's audience, you'll need to see that as humor. Offensive and crass and humorous.

Otherwise this isn't a story I think you'll get into. And you'll need to want to get into it...the blizzard at the end of the book needs to feel like we felt then, a suspended moment of possibility, a confusing intersection of many corners all hidden behind drifts and shockingly cold winds forcing your face away from the way you started out wanting to go. That moment in the narrator's life was one where there were many ways to go. He went too far away from the one he thought he wanted and it took a blizzard to show him where he had to be.

Author Lipsyte won't be going back to the days of wine and roses, as the old saying has it; he's fifty-four now, and this story just couldn't come from anyone not fifty-four. My viewpoint, ten years ahead of him, was different enough to make this fun trip to a time I loved familiar enough. I wouldn't have seen it from this angle but it was still speaking to me.

Over forty-five? Give this a read today. What else is that gift card for if not to try to time travel?

FRACTURE, Holocaust gay love affair & BEFORE ALL THE WORLD, gay Jew and his Black lover in Depression-era Philadelphia

BEFORE ALL THE WORLD
MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Picador's trade paper edition out 10 October 2023 for $19.00

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Read Jean Hets's review here!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

"ikh gleyb nit az di gantze velt iz kheyshekh."
"I do not believe that all the world is darkness."

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles—fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep—a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion.

Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed.

Then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings.

Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I fear what I am about to say will doom a very fine read in too many of y'all's eyes: This isn't a standard-English-only novel. The characters sometimes speak Yiddish, sometimes speak as though mentally translating Yiddish into English on the fly, and all of it at the author's preferred energetic pace. The best I can say about those whose reading doesn't often stretch to variants of English is, there are very helpful footnotes.

Oh well. I had to say it despite the fact that most of y'all just clicked over to I Can Has Cheezburger? for a chuckle or two.

If you're still here, let me assure you that there's a lot to love about this story. Leyb/Lion, a gay Jew, is really and truly alive for me; his on-again, off-again love for the surprising Charles, a Black labor-organizing socialist-sympathizing Yiddish-speaking multihyphenate whose precarious identities are beautifully balanced. Their love story, to my gay eye vanishingly light on sex, is only one of the story's love stories. Gittl, a poet/seer of angels, is Leyb/Lion's nowsister who was presumed killed in a Red Army pogrom he avoided by being thrown out of Zatelsk for his faggoty ways. She shows up in Philadelphia, mirabile dictu, and is fêted by the middle-class Jewish community led by a soi-disant Baroness there as a harbinger of socialist paradise...despite almost dying at the hands of the "socialist" Soviets. This lionization ends when Gittl and Charles, um, well.

How this dissonant collection of adherents and believers and practitioners harmonizes their modes of being, their inner identities, and their actions is as one would expect: inconsistently and imperfectly and, all too often, inconsiderately. Every adult has learned to accept that others love in their own ways, or has been carted off to a safe place with lots of lovely pills to manage the aftermath of refusing the lesson. Leyb/Lion and Charles with their utterly amazing intersections of identity are, to no one's surprise, among the most wounded. Charles's belief in the socialist revolution survives the movement's apathy towards acknowledging the hideous harm caused by slavery, and its continuing horrors and cruelties. Leyb/Lion's gayness, well...Jews weren't mad for it then, though I understand there are more accepting branches of Judaism in modern times, and have no reluctance about letting him know he's less than, lower down in their esteem because of it. Gittl's a woman. What else needs be said, that fully explains the horrors she has and will endure before, during, and likely after amerike, philadelphiye, the doctor who slurmed out (of) his amerikanische, tooth jutting mouth the horrible, cruel orders to sedate her...are all in Life's past. It is this dissonance, however, that shaved a half-star off my rating. I wasn't as convinced as I thought the author expected me to be that these people would enact the steps they danced to. I was close to believing it for Gittl and less so for Leyb/Lion; Charles, the man made of and for Love, perhaps least of all. It wasn't an existential, "what are you even talking about?" level of dissonance but a quietly uneasy mental drumbeat of "...really...?" throughout the read.

“What will you do before all the world?”

That is the heart of the novel; that is the wisdom the reader is offered by the read. It's not clear to me that the characters *answer* this question. It is clear to me that they live in its words, that they think inside the whorls of that question mark and fall onto the finality of the period at its base.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRACTURE
ELYSE HOFFMAN
Project 613 Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-wrenching WW2 story of forbidden love and torn allegiances.

Franz Keidel is a monsterous SS soldier: loyal, hateful, and devoted to Hitler. With a cold heart, he hunts down his Führer’s enemies, but one fateful mission will fracture his shield of ice.

While hunting for Jews, Franz stumbles across a familiar face: Amos Auman, his childhood friend. Amos is the only source of joy in Franz’s life, but he is also a Jew. Unable to bring himself to kill his friend, Franz vows to protect Amos from his fellow Nazis.

As Franz spends more time with Amos, bringing him food and books, he falls in love with his kind-hearted friend. How could he fall in love with a man, a Jew? How can he continue to hate Jews when a Jew has thawed his icy heart?

And what will Franz do if he has to choose between Amos and his loyalty to Hitler? What choices does he have when he is already beyond redemption?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think a lot of us in the QUILTBAG community have forgotten, or at least not paid much attention to, the fact that Jews who were gay during the Nazi era were doubly endangered by their identities (where do y'all imagine the pink triangle symbol still widely used in our community came from if not a repurposing of a hate symbol?). It's simple, really, to focus on the six-million-dead mantra; there's no such count, either kept or kept alive in the public's awareness, for QUILTBAG or other victims of the eugenic nightmare of Nazi Germany and its eager hench-rats all over conquered Europe.

Amos is doubly blessed, then, as a gay Jew...two targets on his thin shoulders. Franz, abused and brutalized all childhood long, found such refuge as was possible with Amos and his family. But events conspire to separate the boys, as is usual in life. What counts for more with Franz than any memories of happiness is the community and sense of belonging that he finds in the hate-filled and -fueled ideological mob of brutes and bastards that replicate his abusive family...from the inside this time, as he gets to be the abuser instead of the abused.

Meeting fugitive Jew Amos again, knowing it's his friend Amos, and being in the position of power over Amos instead of dependent on him, his family, for such kindness as he ever knew, enables Franz to find a way through the maze of rage and pain he's carried inside for his whole life. He chooses, in a split second, a course of honor and love when he has accepted the course of hatred and violence that come naturally to him. To all humans, really. His decision to lie in order to save Amos's life is the crack in his armor that will lead him to accept the truth about himself and thus about his world. He loves Amos as a friend, he desires Amos as a lover, and he must then reject the lies and distortions he's been embracing as fundamental to his sense of himself to be the self who deserves Amos's return of love.

The first-kiss scene between the young men was very moving.

That might have made the inevitable ending more saddening, more painfully awfully real. One knows this can't, outside the realm of fairy tale, end in Happily Ever After. But the actual events are a gut-punch of reality after a honeymoon of discovery and love. (Side note: The Epilogue wasn't successful to me. It's a full-star deduction for silliness.)

But the four-star rating above should tell you what you need to know about my opinion of the story. It's a shame nothing made by human hands can be perfect, or at least not often, but perfect is the enemy of good. This is a good story told well. If it didn't actually, factually happen this way somewhere, I'll be surprised. And that ain't nothin' in my reading life.

THE PORT-WINE STAIN, third in Norman Lock's American Novels cycle

THE PORT-WINE STAIN
NORMAN LOCK (The American Novels series #3)
Bellevue Literary Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In his third book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgeon and collector of medical “curiosities,” and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelgänger, he loses his mind and his story to another.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: I’ve read other reviews in the book-blogosphere that were, shall we say, indicative of a certain disappointment in the blogger’s experience reading The Port-Wine Stain. I am not among these bloggers. I liked the book. In fact, I liked it the best of The American Novels cycle that Bellevue Literary Press will be publishing through 2018. I asked their publicist for all of them published so far, since I was that curious about Lock’s aims. When they arrived (thanks again!), I started from book 1, The Boy in His Winter, which wasn’t a favorite of mine; American Meteor, second in the cycle, which definitely was a favorite of mine; so now, by book three, I think I might have absorbed a sense of purpose and a trust in Lock’s craftsmanship and artistry that others might not have the advantage of possessing.

Or maybe I just have really good taste. This book was shivery-good.

He knocked absurdly on the skull like a man impatient for a door to open. His eyes glazed over. He appeared to be in the grasp of something beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
“Time is slowing,” he said in a leaden voice. “Each moment grows and fattens like a drop of rain on a window sash, waiting to fall.”

That’s Poe upon visiting our invented narrator, Mr. Edward Fenzil, aged nineteen and of ignoble stock, who has been gifted with a leg-up in the world by becoming bone-keeper in Dr. Thomas Dent Mütter’s medical school. Does it feel over-the-top to you? Then forevermore don’t read Poe himself! As Edward dusts skulls, Dr. Mütter gives him what amount to private lectures. It was required that he clean the operating theater after surgeries, but he was also always within reach of the great man, could pose questions, and assist the doctor with his researches on different scientific subjects.

Dr. Mütter also encourages a closeness between Edward and Edgar, saying the friendship will benefit Edward by allowing him to observe closely the workings of “the pathological mind.” But in any meddling mentor’s files there are innumerable cases like this, where the intent and the result are at opposite poles. Edgar is a man of the world, a gentleman, and overawes young Edward. It wouldn’t have been difficult, considering Edward’s youth and (in the time period) it wouldn’t be any surprise for a lower-class lad to be unfamiliar with any gentility or mannerliness.

Poe’s proffered friendship has a profound impact on Edward in so many ways. As Edgar introduces Edward to every strange corner of the city of Philadelphia, he (deliberately?) changes the young man forever:

While I knew him, he made me see—Poe did; made me understand that, unlike a bodily organ, the soul desires, even wills, its own continuance. It can be said to be the seat of will and desire and, even in its necrotic state, the root of evil. ... A Sunday school lesson or one of Cotton Mather's gaudy rants that helped to kindle the Salem bonfires is nearer to the truth of it than a fable by Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville. Evil's a malignancy beyond the skill and scalpel of {doctors} to heal or extirpate.

I’m in sympathy with this view, and would be converted to it after learning one of Poe’s lessons for Edward. In order to become a member of Poe’s Thanatopsis Society, Edward is subjected to an appalling initiation ritual involving the young man proving he is worthy of ritual transformation into a death god. Needless to say, Edward is traumatized by the nature of the initiation. So was I when I read it. The tone of the novel becomes decidedly darker after this event, matching the mental agitation of the narrator telling his story some thirty-five years and the Civil War between him and it.

No, I’m not going to reveal the ritual. Suffice it to say that anyone familiar with Poe’s stories will recognize it and feel the same horrified, claustrophobic feelings they had when it they first encountered it. You’ll know when you get there. After the traumatized Edward runs out of the Thanatopsis Club, vowing never to return, he seeks comfort in a local whorehouse, only his second visit and experience of sex. He describes it to Moran in disturbing detail, offering details that would elicit a “TMI! TMI!” from most people, myself included. But rely on Lock to stir you up, rile your easily offended inner maiden auntie:

Ravished is a nice word found in sentimental novel. Between us, Moran, the word that stuck in my mind like shit to the bottom of a shoe was fucked.

And there it is. Why I have come to enjoy so much reading Norman Lock’s writing. It is never all one thing, one note, one temperament of that note. I value this highly because I see so many earnestly presented stories chipped and chipped and finally cracked into a pile of who-cares-dust. Offend me, anger me, and I might or might not pick up another of your books; bore me and we’re done here, this conversation is over.

Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, Edgar realizes he has taken a step much too far by subjecting Edward to what he did. Edward has spent the intervening time vowing never, never, never, so as all the adults in the room know, Edward’s still infatuated with Poe and all he knows, does, and represents. Their make-up meeting, encouraged by Dr. Mütter himself which guarantees it will occur, seems to show Edward that Edgar is genuinely regretful:

“Forgive me,” Poe repeated earnestly.
I nodded coldly. I was not above acting like a child; I was hardly more than one.
“I want you to have this,” he said, fishing a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He took a step toward me. I stood my ground. He closed the distance between us, the timepiece in his hand. “It belonged to my father, David Poe—not John Allan, who fostered me but would not adopt me. My real father was David Poe, Jr., the actor. It's said that he abandoned my mother and me. It's a lie. He died--too young: He was only twenty-seven.”

I accepted his gift. It felt substantial in my hand. In spite of myself, I was pleased to have it.

The tone of this scene is so like that of a couple making up after a fight that I had to pause and remind myself that this isn’t an erotic relationship. It was a time when, however, male friendships were much more intensely conducted than today.

The darkest turn the friendship is ever to take comes not long after the earnest apology Edgar offers, and again at a meeting of the Thanatopsis Club. Edgar has been subtly preparing us, Edward included, for a genuine and unnerving crisis. Each of his acts before this has been explainable, but this one is simply and purely cruel, evil and cruel. The concept of the doppelgänger is a bit unnerving, to be sure: A person unrelated to yourself whose appearance, and sometimes behavior, is as close as possible without being identical twins. Placed in the hands of an unscrupulous man, knowledge of another person’s doppelgänger’s whereabouts can lead to nasty mischief. Edgar having found Edward’s doppelgänger in the form of a hanged murderer, whose likeness to Edward is marred only by a port-wine stain.

Here begins Edward’s descent from nervous wreck to madman. Edgar and everyone around him will not let Edward’s fearful brain slow down for so much as a moment, playing tricks and (in Poe’s case) writing a story about an unfortunate young man named Edward who fancies he has a port-wine stain, which spreads and spreads, and...the story is incomplete. He steals the story in a fit of rage, and bewails ever having laid eyes upon Edgar Allan Poe. Edward’s unbalanced state sinks further as Edgar shows his genuine lack of human kindness by treating Edward’s fears of the port-wine stain merely as evidence of his theft and guilt.

It is a profoundly painful ending for the book, resolving Edward’s story as confinement to the best possible care in a madhouse paid for by Dr. Mütter; released after six months, returning to his former position; his medical degree paid for, as a gift, by the Good Doctor; service as a field surgeon in the Civil War; finally, after a long life, tending the needs of a few established patients such as Walt Whitman, whose impression upon Stephen Moran in American Meteor was so very intense and is the link between Dr. Edward Fenzil and his audience Moran that is at the heart of Lock’s choice of narrative style.

Dr. Fenzil thanks Moran for listening to him ramble, and for ignoring his disfigurement by the port-wine stain he carries as a reminder of a toxic friendship of long ago.

CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS crystallizes Millennial concerns, angst, joy

CONQUISTADOR OF THE USELESS
JOSHUA ISARD
CINCO PUNTOS PRESS
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Joshua Isard’s debut novel is a hoot. Our hero Nathan Wavelsky moves into the burbs with his wife. Life is good. He’s a successful slacker. He doesn’t want to rock the boat. His definition of a good time is listening to his favorite bands on his iPod and staring at the grass and the poplar trees in his backyard. As a mid-level corporate manager, he does what his bosses tell him. If they want somebody fired, he fires them. No questions asked. But the boat does start to rock. He innocently gives a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle to a teenage girl and his neighbors are righteously appalled. His wife’s hormones start to tango and now she wants a baby. Sure, he enjoys sex, but that doesn’t mean he wants a baby in the house. Worse, his best friend wants him to climb Mount Everest. Nathan likes to camp and hike, but climbing the Himalayas? He could die, for God’s sake. He just wants to be left alone. But no chance. Shit begins to happen.

My Review: I can't help myself. I have to ask a not-really-rhetorical question that I've already heard many answers to: Why didn't this book light up the tills of all the bookeries of the country? Why isn't at the least a modestly large cult following hollering about this book?

I loved this book. To me, it feels as timely and as timeless as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. In a lot of ways it's the same sort of indictment of a culture that Sloan Wilson made: How does a man do a soulless job, make a living at it, and still manage not to spend one erg of energy asking himself the central question of a worthwhile life: Why?

Nathan drifts along with his wife Lisa, not imagining a future any different from the present, when *blammo* Lisa gets the baby message from her hormones at the same time as the couple's mutual college friend Mark shows up to entice Nathan into the most insane adventure on the surface of the Earth: Climbing Mount Everest.

Nathan, Lisa, and Mark are the age of my generation's children. They were, as Nathan notes cynically, raised with the belief that every single one of them was a special little snowflake who could do anything! anything! without mentioning what might happen if the anything they wanted to do was "nothing much." Nathan's nothing much is working for the Sirs, as he calls them, doing a mid-level management job very well. Lisa has her college-admissions job. They live in a nice, leafy suburb of Philadelphia. Why, Nathan thinks, isn't this good enough? Like Tom and Betsy in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Nathan and Lisa have just not talked about some important items for future plans, and now it all happens at once: Lisa's hormones, Mark's insane desire to have Nathan with him summiting Everest, and now the Sirs want Nathan to take on a more remunerative and responsible role at his pretty pointless job.

And with that, Nathan's suspended solids crystallize. Yes, of course, he tells the Sirs, but I'll need ten weeks leave first. I have to go climb Mount Everest with my old college buddy. Amazingly, after some ritual posturing, the Sirs agree; the training begins, Lisa has several meltdowns but ends as we all, including her, know she will: Supporting Nathan. An expensive venture, requiring a lot of training, to do something that Nathan and Lisa both agree has no real value.

In the end, of course, it's the things that have no "value" that are the most precious. As we leave Nathan and Lisa, they're still "slackers," neither has gone into Greenpeace or the Occupy movement; but what they are as people, who they are as a couple, has crystallized.

Luckily for us all, it's a diamond that glitters in front of us and not mere salt. Make some noise, readers, order copies, read them, write reviews! Isard's work should be celebrated!