|  in print, Matthew Klam stands up here and
delivers definitive, high-energy riffs on the theme of modern love and all its
complexities. One by one, these stories amuse, enlighten, and entertain. As
a group, they mark the full emergence of one of America's foremost young
literary talents.
In the immediately engrossing title story, Samuel Beardson falls in love
with a young woman across a crowded room who upon closer inspection turns out
to be a bird-boned, longhaired, slim young fellow named John Drake. In a
single moment, in a spell-binding voice, Sam The Cat enters the Twilight
Zone, and a young man's cocksure, womanizing lifestyle unravels: "There I am,
horned out and at the same time queasy with the weirdness of it."
In "The Royal Palms," Klam's overworked, newly-monied hero emerges from a
Caribbean resort casino with a pile of cash stuffed into his T-shirt. Beside
him stands his wife, Diane, furious at herself for the cellulite that's
recently appeared on her thighs and backside. Their marriage is at a sexual
standstill. Then, the sound of an old Jeep spooks them. In the next moment
they are running for their lives.
Having fallen in love with his girlfriend Phylida's beautiful behind, the
narrator of "Issues I Dealt With in Therapy" has flown to a Nantucket-like island with her for a wedding. He's
been asked to toast the groom, once a well-intentioned civil rights lawyer
who's grown into a sweating "Gore-guy," a self-absorbed power pol, a hot,
young twenty-something curry-barfing bulemic on his way to the White House.
Phylida, meanwhile, is a sleepless, hypochondriacal medical school resident.
Among this cast of frank and foolish characters, we're left to wonder if we
have any control over whom we love.
Matthew Klam is an O. Henry Award winner, a regular contributor to
The New Yorker, and his generation's most on-key singer of the
boy-meets-girl blues. The stories in Sam the Cat crackle with humor,
intelligence, and style and add up to an outrageous, entirely original, and
unforgettable debut.
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