HE: An Irreverent Look at the American Male

by Florence King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 1978

An Irreverent Look. . . through off-color glasses, after an engaging beginning exhuming the sex life of a coed in the Fifties--""My Four Years in a Penile Institution"" (all puns undoubtedly intended). On fleeing her virgin estate, King (of last year's Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting?) tosses off the men she's tried and typed--Liberated, Simplistic, Misogynistic, etc--and double entendres: ""If multiple orgasm were a French verb tense it would be called Plus-Que-Parfait Superlatif. Nothing less will do now, and everybody is conjugating like mad. . . ."" King is too good at the word game to have to descend to street-talk to score, but she does, adopting a tone of cavalier vulgarity--e.g., on the impotent man as a real catch: he provides today's woman ""a chance to be the first girl on the block to get him hard. She can test her new fellatio techniques and find out where she blows on a scale of one to ten."" A self-proclaimed ""spinster"" at the age of 42, King is brainy and big on literary references, observant if opinionated (""When a man undresses a woman he feels like a rogue; when a woman undresses a man she feels like an undertaker""), and blessed with a sense of humor about herself and contemporary feminine-isms. Telling it as she sees it, she's sharp and funny; the like-it-is vocabulary doesn't become her.

Pub Date: Dec. 8, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Stein & Day

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1978

Categories: NONFICTION