THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID

Lying in bed, a favorite habitat from the time when he was an enuretic child, balding, hypochondriacal, paraphobic (he's afraid of just about everything), Kenneth Holm reviews the private wasteland of his life. He's also worldly, well read, prolix and clever, although his self-absorption invites a kind of fictional suicide. His experiences, failed or otherwise, are annotated from the first fatal fetal imprint; on to the pubertal rites de passage; a summer at camp as a counsellor and an incomplete romance; Dartmouth where there's a particularly unattractive seduction; and the later years as door-to-door salesman and donor to a whole suburb of married women, one of whom dies on his hands in a motel. When first seen, Kenneth is contemplating his own decease but he's such a denatured sort you won't be sorry to see him go.