Black comedy meets social satire meets British farce in this winning novel by the author of Man Kills Woman, which shows how one man's generosity can become the source of another man's insanity. Phillip, an ex-football (as in soccer) star and a vaguely hapless instruction manual writer, is best friends with couple Barry and Sean, who are so rich and nice that they shower Phillip and his family with lavish gifts—skiing vacations, rare Chinese carvings and priceless Venetian corkscrews. With each new present he receives, Phillip becomes more obsessed with finding the perfect return gift. Repeated failures leave him so overwhelmed by gift inadequacy ("I had lost. I had been defeated utterly... I was the inferior man") that his attempts at reciprocation begin to look more like revenge. A sketchy fellow named Carlo—whom Phillip meets in jail after a dinner party gone awry—feeds Phillip's anxieties, and soon Phillip is sneaking into Barry and Sean's home in the middle of the night to perform a "creepy-crawly": shifting around their personal possessions and inadvertently killing one of the chinchilla rabbits he'd given them as a gift. Flusfeder's delightfully spare prose makes room, too, for the search for cult hero and erstwhile Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, with whom Barry is obsessed; movie world excesses, displayed by Barry and Sean's fancy friends; parenting anxiety; and lots of Taoist sex—though why Phillip's wife, Alice, remains eternally willing despite his near-psychosis is a bit of a mystery. This is a witty, razor-sharp novel, with just the right amount of tenderness. (Nov.)
Forecast:The shag-carpet jacket and a blurb from Jonathan Franzen should catch the eye of U.S. hipsters, who will find this compares favorably to the somewhat gentler offerings of reigning Brit-boy wit Nick Hornby.
