Erik Tarloff, The Man Who Wrote the Book

I have long maintained that any book that includes in its first sentence a reference to chiroprocty is likely to be a rollicking read. Happily, I now have a data point to support my theory. Erik Tarloff's The Man who Wrote the Book starts well: "A deep, dispiriting despondency, an oppressive enervating angst, settled over Ezra Gordon around the time Dr. Jacobs put her hand up his ass." The mood having thus been set, the rest of the book does not disappoint.

At thirty-five, Ezra Gordon's better days are behind him—or so his doctor informs him after having withdrawn from his rump. Ezra, at least, is in no position to argue with her. Divorced and deprived of access to his daughter, he is involved in a seemingly pointless relationship with Carol, the sanctimonious spawn of the blustering Reverend Mr. Dimsdale, chaplain at Buehler College. Ezra himself teaches at Buehler, a Baptist cow college in California, but with too few articles under his belt and no stomach for further deconstruction, his upcoming tenure decision does not look promising.

Broke and miserable, under suspicion of sexual harassment, with his life falling apart, Ezra escapes during spring break to the hedonistic realm of his old friend Isaac Schwimmer, one-time graduate student turned successful publisher of pornography. There he consents to write The Book, a fast bit of anonymous, lucrative porn, which turns out to be likable by the likes of John Updike, and which consequently turns Ezra's life upside down.

The Man who Wrote the Book is a good read, fast and funny, with amusing, well-written dialogue. Ezra's internal dialogue, the caustic or ironic comments he leaves unsaid, is even funnier.