OK, here is a guy book.
EW wrote this about The Catastrophist by Lawrence Douglas a few months ago on The Must List: "Impending fatherhood drives a promising young academic to lie, cheat and steal in this acerbically comic debut novel."
The main character, Daniel, is a tenured professor who freaks out when his wife tells him she is pregnant, embarking on a seies of increasingly catastrophic misadventures that threaten his job and his marriage.
Here is a long review from Bookslut. A few excerpts:
What keeps The Catastrophist engaging is its sheer humor in this first-person journey. Academic satire is familiar territory in literature. Just last year author Zadie Smith poked fun of a similar New England college in On Beauty. Both Smith and Douglas have used cocktail parties to show the follies and quirks of professors.
The book is also about the inside baseball of marriage. Daniel and R. often needle each other without the histrionics. This is no sitcom couple with oddball antics. Daniel laments how adventurous the two were early in the marriage while bellyaching about the lack of current tenderness and humor from R. He can’t escape being an academic and analyzes the reason for adultery, taking cues from a philosopher.
Beneath the satire and dark comedy are lessons to contemplate: how does one cope with success and keep the fire in the marriage? These are even harder questions to answer when the problems do not appear in plain view.
EW concludes: "That we enjoy the company of this walking disaster is a tribute to Douglas’ witty prose; that we love R. — practical, attractive, and shrewd — can be chalked up to the author’s bedrock understanding of what constitutes an appealing human being."
Has anyone out there read this book?
PS Check out this CNN article about Larry Doyle, whose book I Love You Beth Cooper I wrote about here and here.