You should definitely read this book, if only for the sole purpose of reassuring yourself that your life is definitely, enormously, ridiculously better than Lowell Lake's, whose charmed, though boring, youth (he unwittingly blackmails a local politician into paying for his Stanford education--he (the politician) thinks that Lowell knows about his secret gay dalliances at his (Lowell's) parents' motel, about which Lowell, of course, knows nothing) takes a decided turn when he marries the wrong girl and ends up moving to New York instead of Berkeley. Since I've recently moved to New York, I had a hard time not convulsing with sad laughter at the ridiculous state of Lowell's adult life. He attempts to take control of his life and marriage by buying (and renovating) a rotting monstrosity of a house in the not-yet-gentrified, still pretty friggin' frightening Brooklyn of the 1960s.Here's Lowell at the altar, realizing he's just about to make a huge mistake:"He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trial. It was the Donner Pass all over again, only permanent." Very bleak, but so funny. Hard to believe it was written nearly 40 years ago. Lowell's inner dialogue is probably the most accurately neurotic one I've read. "Soul food?" and his subsequent self-scolding made me laugh so hard. I realized about 20 pages in that it was probably going to end with him killing someone, and I was OK with that. Someone so neurotic with so much despair is going to plateau in some way. I understood Lowell perhaps more than I should.
