Love Monkey

Love Monkey is a first novel that works on two different levels, and succeeds brilliantly on both of them. It's funny, wickedly so and with many a sharp edge directed at (for instance) super-parents, overachieving cell-phone obsessed New York professionals and people who try to chat with you in elevators. But it's also about an insightful guy taking stock of himself at a crossroads, and it's this reflective tone that puts me in mind of a latter day Catcher in the Rye. It begins with a long section that is breathlessly, can-you-top this funny, as the narrator Tom Farrell casts a gimlet eye on his snack-food and remote-control-littered bachelor hovel and invites us to laugh along with his sadly hilarious world. (A typical breakfast-after a long, Scotch-influenced night that may or may not have involved feeling sorry for himself while playing Simon and Garfunkel records-is a gallon of water and some Tylenol). He's a guy who worries that his generation-the lamest generation, the one that won no wars and launched no IPOs-will be remembered only for non-black tuxedoes, Justine Bateman and Men at Work. And his is a world where Bugs Bunny is sometimes his only friend and his occasional efforts to reach out and connect with somebody, anybody, only result in more confusion. First up is a German American paralegal, the kind who writes angry letters to the New York Times and has a habit of taking things entirely too seriously; Tom is strongly attracted to her (worrying at the same time that he could never date her because his Jewish friends would freak out), but despairs when he discovers she can't tell one Beach Boys song from the next, and has never even heard of the band's founding genius Brian Wilson. Oh well. She doesn't seem interested anyway. Moving right along. We discover after a while that Tom is, professionally speaking, a lot more successful than you'd expect. His cynical take on everything is perfectly matched to his job: he is a gifted headline writer for a jazzed-up, hype-slinging New York City tabloid (called, natch, Tabloid) where he boasts that he was the first hack to ever call Michael Jackson "wacko Jacko," and the first to call Hugh Grant (after his arrest in the company of one Divine Brown) "overblown." The characters he works with are straight out of the classic screwball comedies of the 30s such as The Front Page. There's The Toad, a slovenly editor who is secretly scheming to make it to the top, and Rollo Thrash, a permanently soused story-chaser and raconteur who phones in his writings from a bar stool. Tom cheerfully cleans up Rollo's words but his real occupation in the newsroom is swooning. That's where Julia, an aspiring ballet dancer with a lot of knowledge of books and naughty French words, comes in. Tom is driven topsy turvy by her, and from his descriptions of her you can see why: her lips, he says, are the color of the first bottle of wine you ever got drunk on. They flirt, and do a lot more than flirt, but Julia

OK, this book has women down cold. I admit it. It makes you laugh and it makes you squirm, but mostly it makes you wonder if the author is anything like his hero, Tom, a boy-man who really needs to catch a break from the parade of women he lusts after. The stuff he does to try to attract their interest (like staging a fight in a bar and attempting to make a romantic dinner with one pan) is so hilarious and yet so convincing that I'm going to make my book group read this. Hey guys: are you really like this inside?

When this book ended, I just wanted more. It reminded me alot of friends of mine and their adventures (good, bad and ugly) with dating. At first you may not like this character but you soon come to realize that his heart is in the right place and after all his little tricks, what he really wants is to fall in love. It's a funny book, miles better than the average for this kind of story.

Wow, what a book. Fantastic writing and a totally believable plotline about a guy who's unlucky in love and looking for something just a little bit better. I read this book a couple of weeks ago but have to agree with the SF Chronicle review yesterday that called it exceedingly readable and wickedly funny. Bravo, and thanks for finally showing what it's really like to be a man who not only has a sense of humor, but a tender side, and nothing to do with it.

I got a big jolt out of this book because it has so many piercingly accurate things to say about the single-guy life. When he's firing off one hilarious one liner after another about his dating life, being bewildered by overly proud Super Parents or mocking the ink-stained hacks who work at New York city tabloids, Tom Farrell says the kinds of things a lot of guys say to themselves late at night after a couple of drinks. I haven't read a book as funny as this in a long time, but it's not flashy sitcom-style jokes on the one hand or moronic frat-boy jokes on the other hand. It's sophisticated, smart and, in the end, even profound. Great job.