Locklin's character here, a womanizing educator, looks for love in all the wrong places. Even so, as a married man, he is in search of "something closer to a regular family, a regular marriage," while simultaneously looking for sex on the side. The main character, Jimmy, "cannot afford a nervous breakdown," so he drinks, only to end up in dread of what Hemingway called "The Fear," which the rest of us call delirium tremens. He warns friends and associates not to "take my drinking as an example or as anything manly or romantic." Various women, as if sensing his perpetual horniness, tease but do not bed him. In the end, frustrated, he masturbates while remembering an affair he had with a "very anal erotic young lady." Locklin, as always, knows instinctively how to shape and steer good fiction, especially dialogue. He is a master humorist, though I'm sure all of this would be lost on the hardboiled feminist who'd likely find Gerald's fiction sexist. The rest of us can laugh at the absurdity of Jimmy's chaotic existence.--Kurt Nimmo
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.