Welcome back chum chums. As mentioned last week, I will be using this post as the official open forum for our summer book club. I hope yallz had a chance to visit your local library and check out something awesome. Since we don't have a real agenda or any unanswered comments from last week, let me kick off this week's post by giving you a quick review/brief on what I read last week.
This past weekend I finished Kyle Smith's Love Monkey. The run down: our protagonist, 32 year old Tom Farrell, works at a tabloid called (har har) Tabloid as a robotically uninspired hack. Tom drinks too much. He exercises too little. He loathes himself just the right amount. Unsurprisingly, he has girl problems. He pines for a woman he can't have and is surrounded by others who are looking for something better. So, he takes life lessons from his dubiously successful friends, and music legends of old (Michael Stipe & Mick Jagger). Somehow he gets a bunch of these women in bed, juggles them, and then he fucks it all up. Excited yet? You really shouldn't be. Tom sucks. I hate Tom.
What strikes me about Smith was how quickly he and his protagonist simultaneously draw inspiration from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and then trashes it at the same time (seriously, it is all but called out by name) -- all within the first 40 or so pages. Given how quickly Smith returns to musical references and plays up Tom's preferences for this album over that album and how much he talks about music, it seems hypocritical to be so down on Nick.
What the book does well is embody Tom's personal desires and aspirations in his closest friends. His desire to get married. His desire to settle down. His desire to have a kid and be happy. And his diametric opposite: his desire to be a tall, black, cut, rich, casanova who doesen't give a shit about any woman (but who ultimately is just as personally tortured by a lost love as Tom is). There's this scene in a strip club where shit just goes haywire. I read that whole section as the inner workings of a really bad drunk/depression/breakdown.
It doesn't surprise me that Tom's self described 'manboy' personality is as detestable to me as it is to all the ladies he meets. He tries to internalize all the lessons thrown at him, and he learns from each of the ladies he gets involved in, but ultimately he satisfies none of them. He's too busy trying to be all things to all people.
In the aftermath (and well worn territory) of Sept 11th, Smith addresses things like terror sex (first identified to me via a now defunct [but VERY cool] blog called The Black Table) and how unrealistic we are. Are we trying to have it all -- and is that even a reasonable expectation? Tom couldn't - but if you need a funnier, more uplifting depiction from a female's POV, queue up any recent season of 30 Rock.
--- Ok, that's what I read. Now please, tell me what you are up to, literarily speaking.
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