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A smart feminist seduced by a beefy, muscle car driving chauvinist named Checkers. A devoted wife who bathes her timid husband nightly. A headstrong Princeton-bound high school girl bent on marrying her English teacher. A failed comedian who earns celebrity status as an angry mouse in a stage play. Hulking men's men whose demands on life fall far outside today's nice guy standards.
These quirky, ironic, darkly romantic and sexy characters' lives are weaved in and around first time author Schickler's cryptic and mysterious Preemption apartment building in Manhattan. Schickler burst onto the literary scene in summer 2000 with publication of his short story "The Smoker" in The New Yorker. As characters from "The Smoker" step in and out of the other ten fascinating tales in this "novel in stories," haunting imagery and themes long forgotten begin to emerge.
Schickler employs darkness, mythology, Middle Ages mysticism, medieval rites of passage and bestiality to portray a modern New York full of profoundly lonely thirtysomethings finding love and redemption in the oddest of circumstances. The centerpieces of this eclectic set are "Duty," and "Telling it All to Otis," where Patrick Rigg, a 33-year-old New York stockbroker, has a score to settle with the world. His inner scars run deep over the absurd childhood death of his older brother, Francis, at Guppy The Wonder Fish's theme park. Armed and dangerous, Rigg unleashes some of his tension by psychologically seducing and dominating a growing and devoted harem of young women, making them fall in love with their own bodies.
Rigg's Preemption apartment roommate is James Branch, an introvert accountant who falls head over heels for travel writer Rally McWilliams, who, post-Rigg romance, remains one of the distant yet hopeful Rigg devotees. Introduced in "Kissing in Manhattan," Rally wants what most of Schickler's smart yet unfulfilled heroines hunger for --- "sometimes only gentle contact, a brushing of her lips on the stranger's cheek. Other times she wanted violent, total commiseration." What Rally finds, to her growing delight, is James, who pours his heart out to Otis in the Preemption's otherworldly elevator, a habit he has had since childhood when he sat for hours in his parents' dumbwaiter, hiding from a world that almost couldn't cure his speech impediment.
Meanwhile, St. Agnes High School advanced placement English teacher Douglas Kerchek finds himself the object of standout student Nicole Bonner's forceful affections in "The Smoker." Invited to dine with Nicole and her parents in their Preemption penthouse, the reserved and proper Kerchek is shocked to discover his pairing is wholly endorsed by the Bonners. Again, the story is awash in dark imageries as Samson Bonner reveals his lineage of royalty from the Carpathian Mountains --- Dracula's hometown.
In still another Preemption apartment, jingle writer Jacob Wolf, who never lived up to his Hemingwayesque father's expectations, is bathed methodically and nightly by his wife Rachel.
Rigg brings most of the characters together for the Millennial Solstice Debauchery Spree, a ten-day bacchanal celebration headquartered in the Preemption, plans that soon threaten to destroy four lives. The fates urge St. Benedict's Father Thomas Merchant to the Preemption the night the looming building's odd peace is to be shattered. Rigg discovers Rally's love for James and her subsequent deflection from the harem and he decides that the gun he carries must challenge all of life's absurdities by killing James Branch. The expertly scripted encounter between Rigg and Father Merchant is one of biblical proportions with the gun as Satan and Merchant as the defiant grace of God.
While "kissing in Manhattan" is a mixed metaphor for vanity that leads to loneliness, and brooding shyness that yields greater rewards, the novel is overpopulated by raw sexuality, fantasies involving bondage, domination, beast-men and lucky charms as Schickler slyly references nearly thirty mythological characters and locals, and actively unites humans and animals. He brilliantly builds bridges between the new and old world, while stomping today's political correctness with primal dreams, desires and urges. The startling and surprising conclusion to this charming and endearing set of stories is evidence of the quiet power of an author just beginning to challenge the politically-correct establishment.
--- Reviewed by Brandon M. Stickney
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