Eleven Karens : A Novel

Publishers Weekly

Freud, who considered repetitive behavior the key to both human sexuality and the "death instinct," would have a field day with the narrator of Lefcourt's novel. This unnamed stand-in for the author ("Mr. L-") ponders the uncanny number of Karens in his love life and weaves around them a traditional tale of the writer's apprenticeship. Mr. L is a New York City baby boomer who participates in many of the rites of that generation, from frantic draft avoidance and ownership of the inevitable VW bug to "impersonal... pre-AIDS sex." Among his Karens are a nudist anthropologist; a Togo businesswoman he meets while serving in the Peace Corps; a blind, suicidal poet; and a Scrabble enthusiast who showers on stage at a strip joint. Freud would wisely note that each of these romances begins in slightly zany circumstances and ends in disappointment, the common destiny of the fetishist. Mr. L begins as a wannabe writer of great American novels, resorts to grinding out porno potboilers and winds up as a Hollywood screenwriter. In one sense, the multitudinous Karens are his muses, but they stand more for transience than transcendence: "I think about my Karens, scattered to the winds and connected only by my imperfect memory. I wonder what books they would write if they chose to, and what memories they have of our time together." While few things are less amusing than a middle-aged man waxing maudlin about his past cocksmanship, Lefcourt's characteristically quirky novel (Di and I, etc.) is a graceful coda to the broken promise of sexual happiness. Agent, Esther Newberg, ICM. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Here is a novel from the author of The Woody with a theme of no great profundity and a uniquely piecemeal manner of telling-a jumble of episodic squirming libidos, coupling and uncoupling, and a general juvenile slobbering over sex. In the full flush of youth during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, the first-person narrator happens to have encountered an inordinate number-11-of Karens of a very willing nature. After playing Spin the Bottle and Post Office with his first Karen and almost marrying her at the age of ten and a half, in no time flat he progresses to less innocuous sexual encounters and goes the way of all flesh with ten ready-for-anything Karens over three decades. This catalog of conquests is far from unreadable, and there is enough action in it to keep you alert most of the time, but after our profligate youth and Karen number eight or nine have done their things, a touch of ennui, a tired droop, sets in. To reveal the climax would be unpardonable, but it ends with a bang. An optional choice for larger fiction collections.-A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A faux-memoir from Lefcourt (The Woody, 1998, etc.) in which an unexpectedly sensitive young man describes 11 of his sexual conquests-all named Karen. It's bad taste bordering on betrayal to kiss and tell, which is precisely why everyone loves kiss-and-tell stories. Our unnamed narrator understands this perfectly, and he finds a new hook to pull the reader in: Eleven of his former girlfriends were named Karen, a statistical improbability roughly equivalent to "being hit by two navy blue Volvo convertibles within fifteen months' time in two separate cities." Beginning at the beginning, he starts by recalling Karen Shrummer, his childhood sweetheart, whom he "married" in an improvised (and, fortunately, nonbinding) ceremony in the fifth grade. In high school he nearly lost his virginity to Karen Szbachevsky, a swim-team cheerleader, and in college he lost his heart to Karen Myers, a young woman at the Pennsylvania nudist colony where he worked as a waiter during the summers. There were eight more, such as Cara Boleri (an Italian girl he met while backpacking in Rome who introduced him to the ménage à trois), Karen _______ (the underaged daughter of a prominent psychiatrist he taught at an exclusive private school in Manhattan), Karen Ogbomosho (a fellow Peace Corps member in Togo), Karen Mendoza (a Puerto Rican poet he met while driving a taxi in New York), Karen Levesque (a lesbian in Quebec whom he impregnated), Karen IX (a Manhattan stripper and Scrabble addict), Karen Kraft (a Hollywood starlet), and Karen Hotel Debussy (a Parisienne he knew for only two hours and the only woman he ever committed adultery with). His wife is named something else, probably Peggy or Jane or Rhonda. Highlyepisodic (Lefcourt also writes for television) but amiable and fun: this flirts with offensiveness but never goes all the way.