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ANY SLIPPERY ERRORS by Alfred Grossman

ANY SLIPPERY ERRORS

By

Pub Date: April 24th, 1964
Publisher: Doubleday

An impossible, brilliant novel, Errors concerns office politics in the United Nations, adultery, juvenile delinquency and a plot to blow up a great power-plant on the Lower East Side. Charles Kraft, a UN demographer with a compulsion to display his truly extraordinary vocabulary, falls in love with Pia, a typist in his office. Charles is married to Sally, whose sister Kate is having an unsuccessful love affair. When the two sisters go off on a vacation together, Charles begins bringing Pia to his apartment. Pia, it happens, is titular head of a brash band of Brooklyn delinquents and Charles becomes involved with them. He consents to aid in a revenge plot to blow up the Riverside power-plant. During an orgy the delinquents wreck his uptown apartment and Charles decides to wreck, his marriage too, to gain Pia. He arranges to have his wife discover him alone in the apartment with Pia's teenage sister, but when that falls through he loses Pia, divorces his wife and marries his wife's sister instead. There is much dizzying, interpersonal analysis and excellent character-drawing on a hyper-intellectual plane, but the dynamite subplot against the power-plant can't be taken seriously.