“The only time love works,” maintains one of the characters in The Easy Way Out, “is when two people are deceiving themselves in exactly the same way.” Stephen McCauley’s novel is spiked with cynical confidences like that, mostly supplied by Patrick O’Neill, the narrator, who early on confesses that he’ll reveal his “most intimate secrets to any innocent bystander who’ll listen.” Patrick focuses this unnerving frankness on mapping the contours of several doomed relationships, particularly his own. It’s not that he doesn’t love his partner. “For all I know,” he’s the first to admit, “I do.” It’s just that diminished expectations appear to be the rule in Patrick’s world, and his friends don’t help, like the one who reflects that he’ll “fall in love with anyone who’ll stay in the room after I’ve taken my clothes off.” Disastrous relationships are a favorite McCauley theme. Here, as in The Man of the House and Alternatives to Sex, beneath the epiphanies of humor and the myriad plot complications lurks a familiar snag. Patrick’s family just won’t leave him alone. (“During adolescence,” he complains, “the only way I was able to read in peace was to lock myself in the bathroom and pretend to be masturbating.”) Can you relate? Twined in a bitterly resentful dependency, Patrick’s parents have imprinted all three of their sons with a horror of intimacy: the oldest haunts his parents’ house like a pitiful ghost, the youngest teeters nervously on the brink of marrying a girl to whom he clearly can’t commit. And Patrick? Obsessed with the notion of rescuing his brothers, he feels himself sliding into an intractable commitment with his lover. They’re buying a house together, and as the settlement date approaches, his dread mounts. Only by turning his world upside down and giving it a good shake – a process as harrowing as it is hilarious – does he reach any conclusions about what he truly desires. By the time The Easy Way Out reaches inevitable (yet often surprising) conclusions, all the characters have grown – some toward a kind of happiness, others away from it. But a feeling of hope hangs in the air.“A storm was definitely moving in, a bank of dark clouds bringing with them violence and electricity and the promise of relief.”
