Posted by mommaty on
February 12, 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES - The New York Times
Corrosive Characters in Two Novels About Journalists
By JANET MASLIN
LOVE MONKEY
By Kyle Smith
336 pages. William Morrow. $23.95.
GOTHAM TRAGIC
By Kurt Wenzel
312 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $23.95.
The skirt-chasing jerk at the center of Kyle Smith's first novel is self-centered, cynical, royally obnoxious at some times and soggily sincere at others. Of course these attributes are actually selling points among commercial novels about the dating woes of hyperadorable young women. If men deserve equal time in this inch-deep genre, Mr. Smith earns his place with an unstoppable string of glib but hilarious wisecracks. He's a whole lot funnier than he deserves to be.
Kyle SmithMr. Smith, according to a biographical note, "divides his time between the front room of his apartment and the back room of his apartment in New York City." He also edits the book and movie reviews at People magazine, which may explain the professional milieu in which the hero of "Love Monkey" dwells. The hero, Tom Farrell, works for a tabloid newspaper where "every day is spent abusing three drugs: caffeine, MSG and information."
What does he do there? "Just minding my own business," he explains. "Actually, I'm minding the business of celebrities and criminals."
In his leisure hours Tom's "most time-consuming hobby is collecting ex-girlfriends." And this book follows him through the process of chasing and estranging a few of them. There is one romantic prospect named Julia with whom he is particularly smitten, which leads to moments of highly uncharacteristic tenderness from Tom. "Do you ever wish," Julia asks Tom at one of the book's mushier junctures, "that we could skip over this part?" Well, yes.
That's because Mr. Smith's more frequent mode here is to spin off a nightclub act's worth of quips. "When did I last push anything heavier than my luck?" he asks when contemplating weight-lifting at the gym. "For me, every recipe begins the same way: disable all alarms," he says about cooking. And one unhappily married man in the book declares of his spouse: "She's a trophy wife. A Westminster Kennel Club trophy." As a man who sees serious parallels between his own life and Bugs Bunny cartoons, Tom will appeal to a relatively narrow readership. But his mordant, masculine view of the single life in Manhattan is more amusing than most. ("She's 5 minutes late. Which in girl time is 10 minutes early.") And his perspective on tabloid journalism is nothing if not sharp. "The most dangerous place in New York," he writes, "is between a thirsty hack and a bar."
In the course of "Love Monkey" Tom occasionally turns his hand to reviewing. Since his newspaper's longtime film critic seldom sees anything longer than a trailer, Tom's services are a definite improvement. When it comes to reviewing David McCullough's biography of John Adams, though, he finds it much more convenient to look up Nexis clips of other reviews than to do any actual reading. "No one's ever going to accuse you of not having read the book if your review is a valentine."
Proof that "Love Monkey" has been read: this effervescent if occasionally sophomoric novel winds up curdling over one serious misjudgment. The story's time span includes Sept. 11, 2001, and has a cynicism-free account of journalists scrambling to make sense of what they've seen. But then a day or two passes, and Tom essentially forgets all about this. He's back to worrying about his career and his sex life, but it's not that easy. The book, thus sobered, never successfully gets back onto a lighthearted track.
On a big expense account and a lucky day, Tom Farrell might make his way into City, the restaurant around which Kurt Wenzel's second novel, "Gotham Tragic," revolves. City is an elitist watering hole that caters to high rollers. Boorish behavior is tolerated and even encouraged here, since it indicates that the liquor charges will be sky-high. Many of the book's characters are low-ranking members of the City staff, and they are Muslims. The waiters here constitute what the book calls a Bengali Mafia.
Kurt WenzelEnter Kyle Clayton, the caustic hero of Mr. Wenzel's extremely winning first novel, "Lit Life." Kyle is a patron at City but just barely: his stock in the New York literary universe remains dangerously low. He once wrote a book so popular that everyone who's anyone still hates him. Now he is "Kyle Clayton, centerpiece of scorn, prey to a thousand Page 6 drop kicks." And he is also a converted Muslim.
Mr. Wenzel's more strained but still sharp-eyed book describes what happens when Kyle, who adopted the faith of his Turkish wife, Ayla (even though he refers to her father as an Ottoman ogre), draws desperately on his religion for material. He writes a magazine article called "The Counterfeit Conversion" to stay afloat. Quicker than you can say "jihad," Kyle has made enemies on all sides of this darkly sardonic story, which also features a rich, loutish mogul ready for his Tom Wolfe close-up. Mr. Wenzel's social satire isn't that acute, but he clearly knows whereof he speaks.
"Gotham Tragic" winds up manipulating its corrosive characters onto a collision course, where the book's financial inequities, literary ambitions, sexual betrayals and religious disparities finally explode. It isn't easy to pull a happy ending out of this mélange, but Mr. Wenzel nonetheless tries. And he, too, invokes the World Trade Center, this time as an elaborate ice sculpture that decorates an outrageous turn-of-the-millennium party at the restaurant. In every sense it signals the meltdown to come.
![Lit Life, by Kurt Wenzel [Unabr Audio Book] NEW!](http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/pict/380033794963_0.jpg)
