I found this book in the closet of a decaying half of a house tucked away in the mountain forests of western Puerto Rico. The ridiculous premise confused me. Am I to feel sympathy for a wealthy middle-aged architect on hiatus from his dead marriage, as he confronts his aging, failing body, both within and outside the experience of variously sleeping with three gorgeous, unemployed models, all of whom are half his age and somehow have come to live for a time in his sublet New York City apartment, but are likely to leave him tragically alone at any given point. The book could be read as some sort of commentary on the male aging process intertwined with the predictability of vanilla heterosexual male fantasy, but I was bored with looking at it that way before I even started considering it. And I failed at attempts to make it more than this. Thus it felt like cotton candy to my reading mind.

Lowering the lens closer to the page, there are bits of humor, and a few interesting stylistic techniques, such as sentences running together in parts (see below) and alternating viewpoints, including some chapters aligned in a Q & A format between Simon and Simon, or maybe his therapist; it's not exactly clear.

I read it to the sound of chirping tree frogs and cackling red-eyed lizard-cuckoos. I think I read it in a day...it was a fast one. I don't know--time was of little consequence, at the time.

"But if she's a poet then she won't keep him poets burn their candles down to nubs. And then find new candles. That's what they do. [...] Poets eat up all of experience and then make poems of it." ( )

A series of very short "chapters" (almost separate stories) with a very amusing premise-- a newly separated married man lives in an apartment with several beautiful woman who all love him. Only Barthelme could find the down side, and he does. ( )