STRANGE SKIES

First novel in which a 30-something bad lad feigns cancer to stave off fatherhood, but the masquerade sours when it turns out he really is terminally ill. Comic misadventures ensue—oh, and life lessons, too.

Terrified by the stolid suburban life of an older brother addled by “septic kid shock,” Paul Mauro has run out of ways to fend off his wife, whose insistence on starting a family has grown uncomfortably direct. Paul delays one last time by playing the cancer card; he’s had a small arm-growth removed, and there’s a chance the oncologist will tell him tomorrow that tumorous cells have spread. The medical news is good, but by appointment’s end Paul has decided the only way out is to declare himself a dying man…and he’s embracing the corpse-to-be’s freedom from convention, embarking on an affair with a patient whose news wasn’t so good. Later, with his lover dead, the transgressive exuberance of those early “post-diagnosis” days gone, his marriage kaput and his health turned against him, Paul encounters in an airport bar a woman and her little boy, himself sick with cancer. Swept into their lives, he begins a fitful journey toward responsibility, in the end even toward surrogate fatherhood.

Perhaps too glib and superficial to manage the Nick Hornbyish combination of comedy and poignancy it aims for, but Paul is good fun: self-pitying, self-mocking, lively, sometimes hilarious. Not a profound book, but a fast-paced, entertaining one.