Plain and Normal

Mr Norris wants everyone to know that he is gay. The problem is, no one will believe him. His position isn’t helped by the fact that he is living with his ex-wife and that he has never had sex with a man. Plain and Normal is James Wilcox’s long awaited new novel.

In his funniest novel yet, James Wilcox introduces us to a Mr Norris, a man who just wants his life to be plain and normal. Everything will be much easier if everyone is clear about who he is. That he is gay, for example. But unfortuantely life isn’t that easy and people will keep on drawing the wrong conclusions. In this hilarious new novel Mr Norris gets in deeper and deeper. Only Mr Norris could go to a gay club on the wrong night, and, being too polite to leave, get into conversation with a homophobic lorry driver called Rocco. But then no one in this novel is as plain or as normal as they seem.

The paunchy, earnest 43-year-old Severinus Lloyd Norris strives for a life of stasis amidst an emergent midlife crisis brought on less by age than by the people in his life. Pearl May, his beautiful wife of over 20 years, has just divorced him and has been encouraging Lloyd to come out of the closet and, eventually, out of their shared home in Yonkers. His attempts at being a volunteer companion to the elderly for Manhattan Cares are foiled when his clients reject him for being too boring. His boss, Ms. Vigoris, can't get him to gracefully accept a promotion at the label and logo company, one that should have come years before. Even the man Lloyd desires can't make a successful pass at him.

Lloyd fights with all his heart to live a plain and normal life, yet with his supporting cast of characters, he doesn't stand a chance. There's an ex-lesbian Christian widowed meter reader turned synchronized swimming coach; an overbearing, incompetent secretary with distant ties to Dutch royalty--whose eccentric fiancé happens to be in love with Lloyd; a power-hungry former boss who guilts his way into Lloyd's personal life in an effort to sleep with Pearl May; not to mention the Jesuit priest eager to fix Lloyd up with his cousin. Although Plain and Normal, Wilcox's seventh novel, may not dissuade longtime fans from their preference for earlier works like Modern Baptists, this satiric romp on the pains of growing older may attract new readers to one of the late 20th century's smartest comic novelists. --Kera Bolonik