NO MAD

An interstate odyssey chronicling a brazen hero on a journey both scatological and transcendent.

When he comes home one day, Aaron Abrams finds his brother and wife making love in his pool. He dumps a bucket of cold water on their hot scene in protest, and thus the hero’s journey begins. Immediately packing his life into his car, he heads to New York and the big book-publishing deal he’s just scored. One of the first things we learn about Aaron is his obsession with Newman’s Own lemonade, a detail that Moffie (The Organ Grinder and the Monkey, 2008, etc.) is so charmed by that he never lets readers forget it. These initially funny quirks and some uneasily episodic encounters work overtime to sustain the protracted account of Aaron’s avoidance of his family’s dissolution. After a meeting with his hot lesbian agent, she throws him an assistant so taken by his writing that an immediate bedroom session ensues. Indeed Aaron experiences so many lurid sexual encounters during his sojourn that an Ian Fleming novel seems modest by comparison. In fact, so little attention is given to the central betrayal that Aaron and his world never properly take shape. Aaron travels cross-country gathering inspiration for his next masterpiece, but nowhere in his dialogue is it evident that he writes serious books for a living. Full of self-reverential references, jokes and conversations meant to flatter the hero or plug pop-culture favorites, the central story is often left in the dust–and Moffie’s intelligence and wit, which are on display, can’t make up for it. There are some memorable moments, but there is no settlement between story or attitude, and this vacillation dilutes both. Aaron’s unexpected battle with hemorrhoids makes for some painfully funny and frank passages, but just as he becomes human, he slips back into cipherhood, leaving him only to function as wish-fulfillment. The moods are admirably varied, but the book ends with a flavor so inappropriately saccharine that it’s not the completion of a full portrait of a man, just the symptom of a story without limits.

A novel that exhibits flashes of rich humor and intelligence, yet never gels.