ELEVEN KARENS

A faux-memoir from Lefcourt (The Woody, 1998, etc.) in which an unexpectedly sensitive young man describes 11 of his sexual conquests—all named Karen.

It’s bad taste bordering on betrayal to kiss and tell, which is precisely why everyone loves kiss-and-tell stories. Our unnamed narrator understands this perfectly, and he finds a new hook to pull the reader in: Eleven of his former girlfriends were named Karen, a statistical improbability roughly equivalent to “being hit by two navy blue Volvo convertibles within fifteen months’ time in two separate cities.” Beginning at the beginning, he starts by recalling Karen Shrummer, his childhood sweetheart, whom he “married” in an improvised (and, fortunately, nonbinding) ceremony in the fifth grade. In high school he nearly lost his virginity to Karen Szbachevsky, a swim-team cheerleader, and in college he lost his heart to Karen Myers, a young woman at the Pennsylvania nudist colony where he worked as a waiter during the summers. There were eight more, such as Cara Boleri (an Italian girl he met while backpacking in Rome who introduced him to the ménage à trois), Karen _______ (the underaged daughter of a prominent psychiatrist he taught at an exclusive private school in Manhattan), Karen Ogbomosho (a fellow Peace Corps member in Togo), Karen Mendoza (a Puerto Rican poet he met while driving a taxi in New York), Karen Levesque (a lesbian in Quebec whom he impregnated), Karen IX (a Manhattan stripper and Scrabble addict), Karen Kraft (a Hollywood starlet), and Karen Hotel Debussy (a Parisienne he knew for only two hours and the only woman he ever committed adultery with). His wife is named something else, probably Peggy or Jane or Rhonda.

Highly episodic (Lefcourt also writes for television) but amiable and fun: this flirts with offensiveness but never goes all the way.