Plain and Normal

Anne Tyler

Mr. Wilcox has real comic genius. He is a writer to make us all feel hopeful. -- NY Times Book Review

Los Angeles Times

Wilcox has amazing assurance and a nearly perfect ear. He is a natural.

Walter Kendrick

Each time out, Wilcox gets better -- subtler, more complex, closer to the fusion of pathos and joy that makes for the highest comedy. -- Village Voice

Philadelphia Inquirer

Wickedly accurate but gentle-spirited, James Wilcox's sense of comedy is rare in contemporary fiction.

Newsweek

James Wilcox is that great rarity, a genuine original.

Dan Cryer

Like Anne Tyler, Wilcox writes with a compassion best expressed in the willingness to laugh at his characters' foibles. -- NY Newsday

From The Critics

Wilcox's hilarious seventh novel concerns the meek forty-something S. Lloyd Norris. Through misunderstandings too convoluted to detail, he ends up being promoted ahead of his boss, hit on by straight policemen, and confessed to by his parish priest, while also inadvertently offending the hair-trigger sensibilities of his contemporaries who refuse to acknowledge their human inconsistencies. Populated by zany characters, this book is very funny when skewering human near-sightedness and modern special interest groups, although less so when going for easy laughs about Yonkers and synchronized swimming.
­Kevin Grandfield

Library Journal

This strange little character-driven book by the author of Guest of a Sinner is peopled by extremely eccentric, unappealing folk. Business exec Lloyd Norris has just come out of the closet and is looking for love. Having suppressed his natural desires for so many years, he's more than a tad shy. Lloyd's also terribly conflicted and mixed-up, forced to live with his harridan of an ex-wife (whom he married to save from shame in their backwater Southern town when they were high school classmates) so that a mere acquaintance, an impoverished co-worker who pays him no rent, can use his apartment. He's intimidated at work by his CEO, his incompetent supervisor, and his virago of a secretary and treated with disrespect by everyone he encounters. And if this isn't enough, his Catholicism warns him that homosexuality is a grave sin and he suffers from a spastic colon. An anti-hero, but only if you omit the 'hero' part. Too many threads that lead to nowhere and a totally charmless, mostly unfunny story make for a hollow reading experience. -- Jo Manning Richter

Peter Kurth

It's hard to know just what to make of James Wilcox's antic new novel, Plain and Normal, the story of a repressed, downtrodden, reluctant gay man whose only wish is to be "left alone." Wilcox is a master of comic detail, with a grasp of the bizarre and the eccentric that frequently leaves you rolling on the floor. On the other hand, Plain and Normal doesn't really have a plot, which is a drawback even in a novel as funny as this. The book is all situation, all character, all repartee, spinning around in what we may assume is a deliberate circle, ending just as it began and going, essentially, nowhere. It's a double-pronged story about sexual confusion and the power of appearances to shape our lives, but in the end you're screaming for something to resolve itself, ready to throw the book across the room if something -- anything -- doesn't come to a head.

The hero, or anti-hero, of Wilcox's tale is Severinus Lloyd Norris, called "Lloyd" or "S. Lloyd" by his family and friends but always "Mr. Norris" by his creator. It's impossible here to miss the ironic reference to Isherwood, whose "Mr. Norris" was a confirmed, if unlikely, debauchee. Wilcox's Norris is just the opposite: a drab, tired, overworked, overweight, endlessly harassed and completely frustrated New York businessman, who's been dragged kicking and screaming out of the closet by his ex-wife, Pearl Fay, a woman he'd married in high school in Tula Springs, Ala., because she was pregnant with another man's child. Mr. Norris is always doing the right thing, or trying to, though his efforts misfire with karmic inevitability, and he finds himself stuck with the blame for every catastrophe and misunderstanding that afflicts the people around him.

"Why can't people see I'm just about the most bland person on earth?" Mr. Norris laments. "That's all I want. Is it asking too much?" The gallery of eccentrics and egomaniacs who ruffle Mr. Norris' life -- Pearl Fay, with whom he still lives after their divorce; his bosses at NyLo, a company that designs labels for cosmetics and health-care products; his terrifying secretary, Mrs. Kundaa; his wife's friend Dawne, a widow who works as a meter reader and wants to become a lesbian; and the pair of gay men, one "out," one "in," who intermittently stoke his desire -- are all hilarious creations, forever urging Mr. Norris to take action, to trumpet his sexuality to the world, to go for the gold and get laid, for God's sake. But it's an endless series of banana peels for poor Mr. Norris, to the point that his associates begin to suspect he's invented his gayness to get ahead in the business world this being New York at the end of the millennium.

From now on," Mr. Norris vows with a rare flash of spirit, "I guarantee I'm not going to have anything but normal friends, plain, honest, bland people." It's a vain hope. There's a strange and ultimately unsatisfying subplot involving two elderly men whom Mr. Norris thinks are gay but aren't, and what seems like an obligatory AIDS theme that doesn't connect to the larger story. In the end, Mr. Norris is right where he was: all good intentions and no earthly reward. Same with the book, alas, clever as it is. --Salon Sept. 10, 1998

Kirkus Reviews

Unrequited and misdirected loves are the ruefully comic matter of this sprightly seventh novel from the author of such inspired farces as Modern Baptists (1983) and Sort of Rich (1989). As often before, it's a denizen of Wilcox's likably deranged fictional hamlet of Tula Springs, Louisiana, who holds center stage. He's 40ish (Severinus) Lloyd Norris, now a New Yorker, working as a computer programmer for a company that manufactures labels for 'personal care products.' That's only a minor eccentricity in a narrative merrily aboil with them. You see, Lloyd, who's recently divorced from his old schoolmate Pearl Fay (whom he married when a football player made her pregnant), has realized he's gay. This is of no great consequence to his ex (who urges him to find a boyfriend), Lloyd's macho boss, his aggressively motherly secretary, and the dozen or so others brought together by Lloyd's volunteer work for 'Manhattan Cares' and his timid gropings toward a sex life ('all he did in the privacy of his bedroom was eat Fritos and sleep'). Lloyd is a charmingly winsome character, but his distant acquaintances (such as a depressed widower and his estranged octogenarian roommate), whose stories Wilcox pursues in skimpy counterpoint-narratives, never really hold our interest. The novel works best as a collection of riffs on sexual insanity (while permitting a female 'airhead' model to share his apartment, Lloyd must deal with ugly rumors alleging he's not gay), with some delicious incidental comedy (e.g., Pearl Fay botches a suicide attempt by swallowing a handful of vitamin C tablets). Wilcox ends it all with a series of pairings and reconciliations that do tie up loose ends, but alsohave the surely unintended effect of emphasizing his story's narrative unevenness and chaotic structure. Almost as much of a mess as Lloyd Norris's modestly frenetic pursuit of happiness and normality. Fortunately, it's also very often almost as endearing and entertaining.