Straight White Male
John Niven
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0802123031
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Kennedy’s appetite for trouble is insatiable, but when he discovers that he owes 1.4 million dollars in back taxes, it seems his outrageous, hedonistic lifestyle may not be as sustainable as he thought. Forced to accept a teaching position at sleepy Deeping University, where his ex-wife and teenaged daughter now reside, Kennedy returns to England with a paper trail of tabloid headlines and scorned starlets hot on his bespoke heels. However, as he acclimatizes to the quaint campus Kennedy is forced to reconsider his laddish lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this ‘preening, narcissistic, priapic sociopath’.
STRAIGHT WHITE MALE is a wildly funny and whip smart tale of Kennedy’s transatlantic misadventures. It’s an uninhibited and heartfelt look at the mid-life crisis of a lovable rogue.
Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
the last copy of the Lancet he’d read might also have carried newsof the discovery of penicillin. A feature on leeches. Spengler’s input here had almost cost him a lot more than the integrity of his screenplay. There would have to be surgery, yes, but minor. The growth was benign. Kennedy would have a small scar, an ivory welt on the top of his dick, but that would most likely be all. And God bless the NHS. He rang Spengler, expecting to get no further than a flunky – but still intending to give
while you soaked. He sat on the edge of the tub, looking out of the window, sipping the mimosa and reflecting on how agreeable all of this might actually be if it weren’t for the fact that he had to leave it and travel to the campus almost every day – ‘just ten minutes down the road’ Keith had told him – to listen to teenagers talking about their attempts at fiction. Just as he had this thought he heard a distant knocking somewhere, what sounded like a thudding at the heavy front door. He sighed
whatever novel or screenplay or short story they’re working on. No more than one thousand words.’ Why did people keep insisting on remembering things Kennedy had said? Bringing up stuff he’d agreed to do? ‘I’ll arrange to have them delivered in the morning. You can make a start over the weekend.’ ‘What . . . what are you telling me here, Angela?’ ‘You’ll need, you know, to read them.’ He looked at her, his expression slackening into one of sheer horror. ‘Two hundred of them?’ ‘Ish.’ She took
shandy for Robin. He told the barmaid – a very doable tattooed Australian girl – to keep the change from the twenty) and they found a table in the corner in a window bay. ‘Chee—,’ Kennedy began, raising his frothing pint. ‘Oh, there’s Clarissa!’ Robin said, getting up and disappearing across the bar, to where a blonde girl about her age was at the dartboard with a boy a little older. ‘Fucking, Clarissa, is it?’ Kennedy said sourly. ‘The parents big Richardson fans, are they? Don’t they know
fucking years. Taking his iPhone from the bin now, clicking on the calculator function, with trembling fingers he tapped it in. Thirty times thirty-six gave you the lifetime career stat of . . . One thousand and eighty hours of pure onanism. To write a draft of a novel took him (well, used to take him) about six months of working five mornings a week, roughly from breakfast till lunch. Say four solid hours a day without interruptions or distractions. Twenty hours a week. Eighty hours a month