Books like Ladies' Man

”Kenny makes a move.”Kenny Becker is having trouble with his girlfriend. She used to turn him inside out with the force of her passion, but recently she has been as cold as an icicle in a snowstorm. The whiplash from “let’s get it on” to “I’m just not interested” leaves Kenny about to come unglued. The more she pushes him away, the more he wants her. As he tries to explain: ”The need to get laid is an honorable need.”It isn’t just about lustful sex, though that is still the main objective, but with a guy like Kenny in the midst of reevaluating his life on a daily basis, it is also about being desired by someone. He is insecure enough to do 150 sit ups every night, turning his stomach into a rippling topography that looks like the knobby tires on a dirt bike. He knows he is reasonably attractive...so...what gives?When he catches her pleasuring herself, it is like being slapped in the face by a 500 pound silverback gorilla. La Donna, the girlfriend, moves out, and Kenny, who thought he was lonely before, discovers there are whole subterranean levels of loneliness. He is thirty years old, and though everything you read will tell you that 30, 50, 70 are just numbers, they are only numbers if you are ecstatically happy with your life. To see them as just arbitrary markers you must be able to believe that misery and expectations are something long ago eradicated, like the plague or polio . Kenny dropped out of college 25 credits short. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people I’ve met in my life who have told me they were one semester or two short of getting their degree. I always think to myself, what do you want me to say?Kenny is, not surprising, in a dead end job selling Bluecastle products door to door. I’ve done that type of work for short spans in my life. It can be rewarding financially, but ultimately it becomes soul crushing work. Your best customers are the loneliest people on the planet, widowed women with twenty cats. They buy, but what they are buying is your time, a brief interlude of conversation for the cost of hand lotion they don’t really need or scented candles that they will never burn. He quits. ”Kenny makes a move.”With the girlfriend out of the equation, his apartment begins to feel more and more like that Death Star garbage compactor in Star Wars. Thus begins his odyssey; there are Trojans, but they aren’t Greeks, through the peep show, massage parlors, singles bars looking for “love in all the wrong places.” He thinks his driving need is sex, but as we follow along with Kenny, it becomes more and more clear that what he wants is intimacy. He wants his love all in one place. He wants a girlfriend, but as he clumsily tries to pick up women, he shows more interest in making new friends with the other desperate guys he meets. Even when he is successful, it is disastrous. ”Something was pissing me off. I felt this mood of time being wasted. An enraged silence.”What is the alternative? Get a cat? His friend from high school, Donny, appears out of the mist like a battered life preserver in the middle of an ocean of despair. ”Donny. Who the fuck was Donny? He was a memory. A character from some novel I’d read years before.” Donny has gone through some cha-cha-changes. Donny takes Kenny some places that make him uncomfortable. Kenny is going to piss some readers off with his flagrant use of the N word and the colorful words regarding sexual orientation, but there is so much bluster wrapped around all these utterances that I realized very quickly that all of his prejudices, like they are for most people, are borrowed. None of them are based off personal experience, but concocted from fears appropriated from the previous generation. They are as fake as a spray on tan.This is an honest novel. Richard Price has stripped away the layers of this character and left him completely exposed to the reader. We see into his mind. We see his embarrassing impulses. We cringe over his awkward interactions. We feel panic for him as his frolicking mind misses third and floats in neutral, leaving him unable to make a rational decision. He has no role models in his life. He only has the mythology of a paint by numbers guide (education, career, wife, kids etc.) of how to be successful. Going back to school is just a fall back position, a last beacon of hope that a magical piece of paper will land him the castle he desires. We have seven days with Kenny, and when I found myself untethered from Kenny, I kept thinking to myself he is so close to a transformation that could prove to be completely liberating or completely disastrous. Kenny will make a move.If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten