Still Looking: A Novel Concerning Single Men - Softcover

Durstin, Larry

9781877978142: Still Looking: A Novel Concerning Single Men

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1877978140 ISBN 13: 9781877978142

Publisher: Flf Pr, 1997

Still Looking is a comic novel about single men that also serves as a satire on the current men's movement. It is written from the point of view of a man who is part of a men's group designed for each member to relive the one great mythic journey in his life when all truths are revealed and all lessons are learned. This heroic journey (or prime story) finds the main character looking back to a time when he and three of his single friends were struggling to find the right woman while bouncing back and forth between a small midwestern college town and the nomadic singles' circuit of nearby Toledo, Ohio. The inspiration for the book was "Marty," the Oscar-winning '50s movie about aging bachelors and their problems making romantic connections in a relatively simple time. The narrator's prime story in Still Looking, however, takes place in the early '80s--that post-free love, pre-AIDS pocket of time when the battling in the sexual revolution was perhaps at its fiercest--and is examined through the prism of the men's movement of the convoluted '90s, where nothing is ever simple. Still Looking, approximately 90,000 words in length, opens in the present day with Ray Powell--now past 50--getting ready to tell his prime story to his Friday night men's group.

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From the Author:

What I was trying to accomplish with this novel was to, hopefully, draw a darkly humorous picture of the behavioral and intellectual patterns being woven in contemporary relationships, and to do it strictly from the point of view of single men. Over the past 30 years or so the vast majority of the discourse on romantic relationships has come from the perspective of women lamenting the unsuitability of available male mates--much of it done in a shallow Cosmopolitan magazine manner with the emphasis on guys who are afraid of commitment or don't want to stop playing the field ... blah, blah, blah. Well, the four main characters in STILL LOOKING--while certainly suffering from the modern societal malady of intimacy apprehension and not exactly being nobly heroic figures--pretty much blow to smithereens the glib notions as to the kinds of things men talk about with each other. But, again hopefully, in their basically tragi-comic struggle to make romantic connections they help provide some insight into precisely how deeply-rooted and complex are the sets of behaviors that have relegated huge numbers of men and women both to a perpetual state of "still looking."

From the Back Cover:

WHAT DO SINGLE MEN WANT? YOU'D BE SURPRISED. In yet another attempt to piece together the puzzle of his life, Ray Powell, a '60s survivor and veteran of the self-help and recovery movements, joins a men's group designed for each member to re-experience his Primal Story, the single great mythic journey of his life where all truths are revealed. Upon hearing about the suicide of an old friend he hadn't seen in years, Ray realizes that one very strange nine-month period--during the post-free love, pre-AIDS early '80s when the battling in the sexual revolution was perhaps at its fiercest--may hold the key to the mystery of his journey as a man. His Primal Story begins on the morning after John Lennon was shot when the love of his life leaves town with a pizza delivery boy. Crushed and alone, Ray--then a 35-year-old teacher--finds himself falling for a seventeen-year-old girl and hanging out with his three bachelor buddies, including the one who later committed suicide, as they hit the singles bars and war with feminist groups. Forced to face the disturbing patterns of his romantic life, Ray discovers a frightening truth about himself. But with knowledge, does salvation follow? You'd be surprised.

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