Cheap Man About Town (Book) (Mark Merlis) Price

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Customer Reviews of Man About Town

Big dissapointment
What a mean little book! After AMERICAN STUDIES and AN ARROW'S FLIGHT, each in its own way very well written and rewarding, Mark Merlis has little to offer this time out except a central character who seems not so much real as he is a cliched vehicle for the author's contempt for the people he writes about, their world, and his own themes.

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THE THOUGHTFUL ODYSSEY OF AN ANTI-HERO
Joel is an anti-hero. At 45, he's described by his new, young and hunky boyfriend as an "old white guy." He falls far short of the unwritten but absolute requirements that a gay man must have in order to be a player. Nevertheless, Joel is someone to contend with and Merlis outlines his adventures and self-appraisal with touching and bitter clarity.

The story begins when, after 15 years, Joel's boyfriend leaves him for a "younger man." Thus Joel embarks on an oddyssey which includes a search for emotional and sexual contacts as well as an even more elusive search for the "Sante Fe boy," a model he saw in a 1964 swimwear ad who never ceased to fascinate Joel while at the same time making him feel outside everything that is both masculine and fraternal.

Although it is described as dull and ineffectual, Joel actually has an interesting job in the Office of Legislative Analysis. Joel complains that the job is useless, but it is obvious that he takes delight in the workings on Capitol Hill and his part in it. When he is called upon to give advice on a Medicare ruling that would exclude benefits to AIDS patients based on prior sexual activity regarding "personal responsibility," Joel is faced with a moral dilemma. He finds the proposition absurd: "once you start down that line, there's no end to it: smokers, drinkers..." However, he can see both sides: "... to a man in Montana ... there was honestly something disturbing about the spectacle of people partying ' pumping themselves up, dropping a few chemicals, getting it on in open defiance of every recommended precaution ' and then handing Uncle Sam the bill." The atmosphere in Washington with its political background and characters, its variety of men ' some of whom head straight from work to get drunk at the Hill Club ' is telling and cynical.

When he finally locates the one-time model, who now is a grandfather living in New Jersey, he visits him and experiences a moment of defining revelation. "Petras has radiated beauty one day in 1963," Merlis writes, "and in 1964 Joel had caught a glimpse of it...by the time Joel saw it, it was already gone." He begins to realize the purpose of all this: we are on the planet so that "like a man watching from light years away the flash of a star that had died a billion years before ...[it] would not pass away unobserved." Not bad for a non-player like Joel. Now, if Merlis could just get him to join a gym and floss his teeth...

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A portrait of gay life in Washington
The main protagonist of the last book I read was desperately searching for love and substance and he had hurled himself headfirst into a world of shallow relationships and easy sex. The main character of this story, however, is probably just the opposite. Sheltered from gay life for years, and settled in a cushy government job with a cozy circle of drinking buddies, Joel doesn't have much idea of what the world is like outside of Dupont Circle, the Hill Club, and reading the Congressional Record. Poor Joel, he looks longingly at the Chelsea boys with their muscular bodies and their body piercings and he just feels as though life has left him behind. After his long term lover, Sam leaves him after 15 years, he not only has to cope with, eating too much and getting fat, and the ant-gay legislation going through Congress, but he develops an obsession with a picture of a man in a sexy swimsuit from a magazine that came out back in 1964.

Man About Town is remarkably whimsical and tenderhearted in its portrayal of an aging gay man, who feels as though he's let life pass him by. This story is good, not just for an insider's view of the goings on in Washington, and the cynical descriptions of how legislation is formed through the lobbying of special interest groups. But it is also good for showing what many aging gay men are going through, or have gone through. Joel's obsession with the swim suited man in the magazine Man About Town, is an attempt to recapture his past, and to come to terms with the fact that ' yes, he could have done things differently. Joel's journey is touching, comic and deftly observed, as he questions his relationship with Sam, and his life as he drastically tries to get back into the 'dating game' by dating men again, and of course, running off to Zippers Bar every chance he can get.

I've never been to Washington, but Merlis bought the city, and the goings on in Capital Hill vividly to life for me. He has a nice, easy economical style, and an excellent ear for natural conversation. The secondary characters that weave in and out of Joel's life are also deftly observed: Kevin, Sam's new boyfriend is young, insecure and dresses like a rapper; Andrew, Joel's colleague, ambitious and still in the closet, and prepared to compromise his principles for his career; and then there's Michael, young, black, and confessing to like older men like Joel. There's much to enjoy in this book, as Merlis takes us on a very special journey with a rather ordinary but wise man.

Michael