YOUR TICKET IS NO LONGER VALID

by Romain Gary ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 1977

Do your hands tremble uncontrollably after intercourse?"" No, doctor, definitely not, answers Jacques Rainier--on the eve of age 60 and mightily worried. His electrocardiogram is pure gold, his blood pressure's perfect, but every selfrespecting, self-inspecting Frenchman has ""a tape measure,"" and Jacques knows that he's not measuring up, no matter how satisfied his 25-year-old bedmate and true love Laura claims to be. Since Dr. Trillac, ""valiant defender of the prostate,"" offers only sitzbaths, suppositories, and doleful prognoses (""After a certain age, fellatio kills twice as fast as normal intercourse""), Jacques consults famed geriatrician Professor Mingard, who prescribes--and demonstrates--The Crutch, a manual aid to pain-free potency. That's no help to Jacques, and neither, after a while, are his short-cuts to arousal: voyeuristic fantasies of Ruiz, the virile cat burglar. So, with sex a nightmare and his falling factory chain about to go under, Jacques puts out a contract on himseff, a quick death to preempt the slow one. No, he doesn't die--Jacques & Laura & Ruiz drive off to somewhere in The Third World--and we're left with the feeling that perhaps Gary (who's 62 himself) isn't really all that woebegone about the male climacteric. We're also left with some sneaking suspicions about Jacques' dilemma being a current-events parable; devaluation is the metaphor for impotence, there's insistent allusion to the Decline of the West, and America (represented by a pseudo-macho millionaire named Daley) is ""the last true phallocracy."" But even with a happyish ending and ironic tilts to balance the clinical detail and intermittent self-pity, this is the grimmest, least fantastical Gary ever--an up-tempo dirge for detumescence that will slug most loudly to those who share Jacques' sitzbath--or his bed.

Pub Date: April 4, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION