sianps's review
1.0
Horrible and pretentious. 10/10 would NOT recommend. To put things in perspective, this is only the third book / series out of the hundreds of books I have read in my life that I just have not been able to finish.
gef's review
3.0
Witty satire of the intense, incestuous little literary world. The narrator (of all but the last few pages) is Gregory Keays, a writer so desperate for recognition he will commit any crime to get it. He sprinkles his text with the useless literary trivia often found in magazines for would-be authors, including the Faulkner quote "Kill your darlings" and "Five Great Authors with Physical Oddities: 1. Ben Jonson weighed nearly 20 stone. ..." Keays bête noire, and no doubt the main model for this book, is Martin Amis.
djrmelvin's review
3.0
A one hit wonder author plagiarizes a student's work to put himself back on the publishing A-List. That's the short summary. To include every thing else that is going on in the life and mind of the main character would give away a very funny and dark story.
gfabulous's review
1.0
there are few things in the world that annoy me more than a straight man's explanation of how women experience sex, and there's a lot of that in this book - like okay, i understood that the main character was supposed to be this frustrated author who's unhappy with his family life in literally the first two chapters, i didn't need the gratuitous explanation of how him and his wife's sex life and his loss of "control" over her (EW) parallels their marital decline. i hated gregory in general! i didn't care what happened to him! i had no interest in reading fourteen chapters of him complaining about the social fakeness of the literary world and how hard and demeaning it was for him to be a paid columnist (boo hoo) before any actual plot even happened! i'd be way more likely to read a book about marigold's life as a successful interior designer dealing with her deadbeat husband than said deadbeat husband feeling emasculated because his wife makes more money than him.
thanks, terence blacker! i hated it.
thanks, terence blacker! i hated it.
More...