Fiction, Fiction Subjects

The Easy Way Out

Name: The Easy Way Out
Author: Stephen McCauley
ISBN: 9780671787387

by Stephen McCauley, Robert Thurman, Jane Rosenman

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Overview

Patrick O'Neil is a travel agent who never goes anywhere. His closest confidante, Sharon, is chain-smoking her way to singles hell, passing up man after man. His parents, proprietors of a suburban men's store whose fortunes are sagging more visibly than its customers, can't agree how best to interfere in their sons' lives. And his lover, Arthur (a nice golden retriever of a guy to whom Patrick can't quite commit), wants to cement their relationship by buying a house.

Then a call comes in the middle of another sleepless night. Tony, Patrick's straight-as-an-arrow younger brother, has fallen in love with a beautiful lawyer who is turning him on to...opera. Unfortunately, she's not the woman he's already pledged to marry. Tony's life is a mess. Finally, the brothers have something in common.

Patrick O'Neil spends his days avoiding clients at the travel agency he works for and his nights avoiding his safe, but passionless romance with his lover Arthur. A tale of doing what you want to do as opposed to what you're supposed to do, McCauley's comedy is filled with longing and truth.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

This heartbreaking book eloquently depicts the compromises that lovers and families make to keep relationships alive. (July)

About the Author, Stephen McCauley

Stephen McCauley is the author of True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, and The Object of My Affection. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit him on the web at www.stephenmccauley.com.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This heartbreaking book eloquently depicts the compromises that lovers and families make to keep relationships alive. (July)

Library Journal

The author of The Object of My Affection ( LJ 3/1/87) returns with an amusing, eccentric collection of dysfunctional middle-class Bostonians. Patrick O'Neil's relationship with lover Arthur ``had developed into the kind of benign domestic dependency that takes love for granted and accepts as inevitable a certain level of boredom, discontent and suppressed rage.'' As the rather predictable plot develops, Patrick's yuppie brother Tony avoids marriage to his childhood sweetheart by having a last fling, and other brother Ryan, recently divorced, feels lonely. Mother and Father O'Neil snipe constantly at their discontented offspring; interactions among the clan make for lots of bitchy lines and great characterizations. Good for expanding gay fiction collections, but not a necessary purchase.-- Kevin M. Roddy, Univ. of Hawaii at Hilo Lib.

Michael Doris

Like The Object of My Affection, The Easy Way Out is an exhilerating, entertaining, smart novel. Vivid, quirky characters leap off the page...on one level, the collisions of these men and women are laugh out loud funny....The Easy Way Out is a great story, a page turner, very contemporary, sometimes arch, always agile...Stephen McCauley is a writer of insight, surprise, and finesse. His novels sing.... -- The San Francisco Chronicle