The Last Man Standing

An oversexed executive dreams of eternal virility and wakes up with leukemia. An older man manages to save himself from drowning, only to discover, upon reaching the beach, that the ocean has stolen his bathing suit and his pride. The subject of Friedman's ( The Polygamist ) stories, for the most part, is the passing of time and its disintegrating implications--the indignity of aging, the decay of the body and the mind, the inevitability of death. His characters are acutely attuned to their mortality, adopting various emotional, aesthetic and material methods to alleviate their fear of dying: the narrator in "A Dead Cousin" surrounds himself with beautiful art; the pathological yuppies in "Did You Know Gorky? Pollock? Kline?" fill the emptiness of their lives with a constant flow of new possessions. Friedman deftly relates the small vicissitudes of these lives with broader existential themes. Unfortunately, his incisive perceptions are sometimes dulled by flat, self-conscious language and simplistic allegorical imagery. Overall, however, Friedman is a compassionate writer with a keen apprehension of the mutability of the human condition.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.