|
Matthew Klam knows what guys really think about such things as failure,
anxiety, and the way they like their female attributes--breasts (firm),
hipbones (jutting), facial hair (nonexistent). These foibles and fetishes are
specific to guys, not men--that is, grown boys struggling to become
grown-ups. Now Klam's tales of fragile, horny men, and the brittle marriages
and strained vacations that undo them, are gathered in a collection titled
Sam the Cat and Other Stories (Random House). While the author seems to dwell
in the realm of self-pitying maledom, he's really bent on exposing how guys
wind up more shatterd than ever when they objectify women and wallow in
existential angst. The story that closes this ruthlessly insightful debut,
"European Wedding," revesals that Klam has a major bead on women. When a
mother nurses her three-year-old and shuns her spouse, Klam writes, "Since
the birth of her son, the sight of her husband's pink backside as he walked
to the bath before bed was enough to destroy her." Another woman thinks to
herself, "She might have been Clinton's first female Deputy Director of
Communications if she hadn't had that long, beat, flat Fiona Apple hair in
the interview." We can more than relate.
--Katherine Dieckmann
|
|
|
