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Men, women & children : a novel

by Kultgen, Chad, 1976-

Format: Print Book 2011
Availability: Available at 1 Library 1 of 1 copy

Available (1)
Location Collection Call #
CLP - Main Library First Floor - Fiction Stacks FICTION Kultgen
Location  CLP - Main Library
 
Collection  First Floor - Fiction Stacks
 
Call Number  FICTION Kultgen
 
 

Summary


Chad Kultgen, cult hero and author of the illicit, buzz-generating classics The Average American Male and The Lie , can cut to the quick of the American psyche like no other author writing today. His unflinchingly truthful fiction examines American culture through a fun-house mirror--both reflecting and exploding the hedonistic, hypersexualized, emotionally treacherous culture in which we live. In Men, Women, and Children , his most ambitious and surprising book yet, Kultgen explores the sexual pressures at work upon two different generations navigating the same Internet landscape: junior high school students and their parents. Prepare to meet:



* Kent, a recent divorcé re-entering the dating world, and his son Tim, a football star-turned-World of Warcraft-addict, who learns via Facebook that his mom is getting remarried.

* Dawn, a single mom who charges anonymous men $12.95 a month to view suggestive online pictures of her daughter, Hannah--who wants to lose her v-card before any other eighth grader.

* Don, who sneaks onto any available computer for his daily fix of streaming pornography, and his son Chris, whose tastes in porn make his father's look like a penchant for Disney.

* Patricia, who is determined to keep the demons of the Internet from preying on her daughter, Brandy--who uses her secret MySpace identity to try on an alternative Goth identity and blog about threesomes she's never had.



Whether thirteen or thirty-five, Kultgen's characters inhabit a world where privacy is non-existent, sex is currency, and information never disappears--yet happiness is still a dream.

Published Reviews
Booklist Review: "With The Average American Male (2007) and The Lie (2009), Kultgen earned a cult following as an audacious, candid chronicler of broken hearts and pop culture. His new novel explores private obsessions and secret lives in the age of the Internet and reality TV. Kultgen's is a comic world, in which 13-year-olds play World of Warcraft and study Chomsky, men rush home to masturbate on lunch break, and women join websites, looking for extramarital affairs. When Tim Mooney, star linebacker for his junior-high football team, undergoes an existential crisis and quits, numerous classmates, teammates, and parents scramble to figure out their own lives. Coach Quinn wants a winning season so he can coach high school. Hannah Clint, a cheerleader whose mother failed at stardom, appears in compromising outfits on a salacious website. And quarterback Danny Vance's fear of sex intensifies when he receives a box of condoms from his father. Kultgen's style and content verge on the juvenile, but his observations into how people become corrupted and needy are funny and moving.--Fullmer, Jonatha. Copyright 2010 Booklist"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "After two novels of puerile juvenilia, Kultgen (The Average American Male) expands his horizons a little in this sometimes thoughtful account of a group of junior high classmates and their screwed-up parents. Among the sprawling cast is the Truby family: parents stuck in a sexless dead-end marriage while son Chris drifts deeper into dependence on strange porn. Then there's Chris's classmate, Tim Mooney, who quits the football team to devote more time to video games, and Hannah Clint, a classmate and aspiring actress whose resume Web site begins drawing a pedophile fan base, to her mother's misguided enthusiasm ("there might be an opportunity to turn the web site into a business," she reasons). Kultgen is an artless writer-the prose reads like an instruction manual, and his characters are little more than the sum of their perversions-but he does manage to pose questions about the things men will never admit to thinking, and about the dark side of the Internet and its effects on interpersonal relationships; it's too bad they're coated in salacious narrative slop. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved."
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
Subjects Parent and teenager -- Fiction.
Families -- Fiction.
Social networks -- Fiction.
Internet -- Fiction.
Sex -- Fiction.
Publisher New York :Harper Perennial,2011
Edition First edition.
Language English
Description 303 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN 9780061657313
006165731X
9780062340115
0062340115
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