[.ca] Kissing in Manhattan (ISBN 0747265119)

From Amazon.com:
David Schickler's debut seems at first to be a lot of fun: a gaggle of young Manhattanites with fancy jobs and fine educations chase each other around town, falling in love or not. In a series of linked stories, Schickler gives us a perverted heiress; a bumbling schoolteacher whose teenage student proposes marriage to him; a bad comic who finds his métier in off-off-Broadway theater. The writing is cool and a bit willfully naive: "Rally McWilliams was profoundly lonely," begins the title story. "She wanted to believe that she had a soul mate, a future spouse gestating somewhere in Nepal or the Australian Outback. But in Manhattan, where Rally lived, all she found were guys." The mood turns dark, however, with the introduction of Patrick, a thirtysomething Wall Street trader who collects women and spends his evenings tying them up in his room. In short order the book's easy comedy is torqued into something more dramatic by Patrick's descent into violence. That Schickler doesn't play to his strengths is not necessarily a bad thing: one admires a writer who reaches beyond facility to something more difficult. But the transition from lighthearted sexual ronde to dirty realism is a bit bumpy. On the other hand, the novel's picture of a dark, desire-ridden Manhattan is an attractively seductive slice of escapism. The linked-stories format gives rise to a feeling of multiplicity, which is just the right tone for a book about a city crowded with pleasures. Describing James, a love-struck young accountant, Schickler writes: "His mind tonight was on the fine and the illicit pleasures of the planet, on their merits and dispersement. Some people cut daisies, thought James. Some visit Wales, or choose cocaine, or dig latrines for the poor and the weak." Everyone, it seems, is after something different. But it's desire itself that interests the author of Kissing in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer

a wonderful kind of strange:
Schickler's collection of stories are strange, but in a wonderful way. They are slightly surreal and absurd, but still believeable in an out there kind of way. Schickler's voice is one that draws the reader in to his world, and I look forward to reading more of his work. The stories in Kissing in Manhattan (which is a wonderful title for the book--I can't think of anything more appropriate) all center around one odd apartment building, Preemption, and the main characters and events of one story are secondary to the next. The best story in the collection is "The Smoker," which is an odd sort of love story that first appeared in The New Yorker and then later in the O. Henry Awards. All the stories in this collection relate to love, or sex at the very least. There is the very touching "Jacob's Bath" and "Telling It All to Otis." "Kissing in Manhattan" is a very strange sexual tale that contains no sex. One of the weak spots of the collection is "Duty," which is the only story that is told in first person. It is an interesting story, but it is a bit jarring to go from a certain distance between reader and narrator and then to jump in this close. It's a good story, but Schickler should have trusted the voice and distance that worked so well for the other stories. The other weak spot was the final story "The Green Balloon." Even though all the stories in the collection relate to each other (and they add to each other by reading each other), they can be taken as seperate stories. With the exception of the final story. It wraps up events from other stories and you can't understand it or truly enjoy it without having read several of the other stories. Still, this is a great collection from one of American letters' great new voices.

A Wonderful Surprise:
What a great book! Kissing in Manhattan opens up with no promise particularly and then turns into an absolute page-turner when the web unfolds. The plot is random at first with a lot of play in character description and analysis. Afterwards when reader finds him/herself questioning if they have seen this character before - it turns out they are all linked either by residence or by association to an apartment block in Manhattan. It's hard to give a plot description of this book without giving the game away (is there a plot anyway one may ask?) -what ultimately unfurls is a robust observation of a series of weird and quite wonderful people that fill Manhattan's streets in some way. Embroiled in the plot is a realization of peoples hopes, fears, desires, family problems, first (and last) loves and reasons why they cannot/ will not love. Although each chapter is linked and entwined by some element of blackness or even 'black' comedy - the reader is left with a sense of hope and 'urban' salvation for all these amazing characters and, in fact, humankind. Many chapters in the book (and one character in particular)remind me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho - see what you think but any character remotely like that is BOUND to be interesting! Read this book, it's a little out of the ordinary - but it's worth it and you'll like it! Another odd little Amazon quick-pick I recommend is The Losers Club by Richard Perez

this is great!:
At first it seems a little disjointed -- various characters, all living in Manhattan, most of them in an old building called the Preemption, built in the 1890s, each with their own private psychosis/neurosis. After a while, however, a plotline linking all of these characters emerges. There is the 31-year-old private school teacher whose student's parents want him to marry her. There is Jasper, who wanted to be a comedian like his grandfather and instead makes his stage debut as an angry giant mouse. There is Jeremy who is so shy but is actually the most interesting (he gets the most short stories devoted to him.) There is also the chilling Patrick, Jeremy's roommate, who likes to dress up women and tie them up, but not sleep with them, in an effort to dull the pain of seeing his brother die in an absurd manner as a child. (The fact that he has the same name and manner as the character in "American Psycho" probably made him really scary to me.) Oddly enough, Patrick goes to church to see one particular priest, who of course has his own story. I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more from this author.

Totally Bizarre and Delightfully Kinky:
I loved the idea of linked short stories working as a novel -- "Slaves of New York" is one of my favorites books, so I was glad when a friend recommended this book to me as a sort of bizarre episode of "Sex and the City" -- all of the stories in this book revolve around the residents of a particular Manhattan apartment building and by "linking" the stories, Schickler turns them into a novel. Individually the stories are very well written and delightfully twisted -- there is "Telling it All to Otis," about the guy whose best friend is the old elevator in the building, and "Serendipity," about the young woman who seduces her co-worker, strips him of his clothes, and then humiliates him by locking him out in the hallway. The art of Schickler's prose is that he is able to pinpoint his character's quirkiness through a variety of methods, be it dialogue, character details, or by placing his oddballs in unlikely settings. My favorite running thread in the book involved the high school teacher and his gorgeous student, whose courtship is detailed in "The Smoker," one of the best written stories in the book. The only drawback for me was connecting with the adult character of Patrick Rigg, the dark, kinky millionaire, whose running thread sends all the plot lines into their strange denouement (though "Duty," which recounts the tale of Patrick's youth is a real beauty of comedy and pathos). Schickler is a terrifically talented writer and I am looking forward to reading more of him.

Give it a chance:
I'm not usually a fan of the short story, but I did enjoy this book, as it was much more than simply a collection of stories. Although each could stand alone (except for the final one), they are all interconnected as characters from any given story pop up in unexpected (contrived?) places in others. This book started out as a light fantastical comedy but became dark as Patrick emerged as a major player. Some of the earlier stories were weaker than the others, so give it a chance if you are not totally excited right away.