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R E V I E W The Man Who Wrote the Book by Erik Tarloff
Ezra Gordon, a literature professor at a Baptist college in California, has hit rock bottom. After a few tumblers of cheap vodka in his three-room hovel, he manages to get an old graduate school friend on the phone, only to sob uncontrollably when the friend asks how Ezra has been. When his friend, Isaac, points out that Ezra can’t embarrass himself further, the 35-year-old professor tells all. A phony accusation of sexual harassment has nearly guaranteed that his tenure case, already pitifully weak because of his failure to publish scholarly articles, will be denied. He’s so broke that the campus bookstore confiscated his credit card. Carol, his sort-of girlfriend and the university chaplain’s daughter, is most likely sort-of dumping him. His doctor informs him, after attempting to inspect Ezra’s chest via his anus, “nature is through with you.” To quell his depression, Ezra accepts an invitation to visit Isaac in Los Angeles during spring break. Since graduate school, Isaac has become a successful publisher of pornographic books and has a BMW, a Penthouse model named Tessa for a neighbor, and plenty of marijuana in the cookie jar. He is handsome, rich, brazen, and witty — Ezra’s foil in nearly every way. When he offers Ezra $10,000 to write a dirty book, Ezra politely declines. He changes his mind, though, in the afterglow of sex with Tessa in a sauna — a scene written with significant detail to indicate that the author has done his research on soft-core pornography.
Upon returning to his drab existence at Beuhler College, but with his L.A. misadventures fresh in his mind, Ezra embarks on a hormone- and caffeine-fueled writing blitz. He pens Every Inch a Lady under the pseudonym “E.A. Peau” in a little over two weeks, even with a weekend off to cavort with the visiting Tessa, whom Ezra seems hell-bent to — and eventually does — disappoint. As he writes, his double life as pornographer and professor sparks many changes in Ezra; he gains confidence and becomes reacquainted with his sex drive, which helps revive his relationship with Carol, who has suddenly and inexplicably become sexually insatiable. Inevitably, Every Inch a Lady becomes a hit. As Ezra’s dirty little secret becomes a national phenomenon, even garnering a front-page review by John Updike in The New York Times, the hunt begins in earnest for E.A. Peau. The search eventually descends upon the Beuhler campus. With an FBI agent (who has designs on Carol), the tabloids and the college administration circling ever closer, Ezra is torn between his conflicting desires to snatch his 15 minutes of fame and keep his blossoming relationship with Carol and his job, because “Once you failed at a shithole like Beuhler, there isn’t any elsewhere.” Ezra’s futile attempts to start a second novel compound the importance of keeping his job and help build tension for a satisfying ending, albeit a very conventional one for a book that often mocks convention.
The Man Who Wrote the Book is steeped in humor, by degree ranging from subtle to suffocating, but the main reasons for its appeal lie elsewhere: The novel succeeds because of its unique plot and lovable schlemiel of a protagonist. Even when the book starts to wander a bit far afield, the story of the professor turned pornographer is inherently interesting enough to keep the pages turning. Ezra is a classic everyman whose foibles and outsized insecurities, which are further magnified during his brief relationship with the oh-so-delectable Tessa, continuously extract new sympathies. Before meeting Tessa, Ezra’s fantasies “were PG-13: Boy meets girl, boy pleads with girl, boy disappoints girl.” While Tarloff succeeds in being funny in most places, he sometimes tries a bit too hard, occasionally tarnishing already humorous situations with superfluous commentary. Near the book’s opening, an overbearing inner voice advises Ezra to, “Let go of your victim’s irony, an imperfect defense at best.” Tarloff’s ability to flavor his writing with this “victim’s irony” is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, but becomes overwhelming when applied too thickly. One aspect of The Man Who Wrote the Book that benefits from Tarloff’s humor, though, is his treatment of academia. The novel slams the “publish or perish” mantra of university life, which holds that professors must find their way into print or find another career. But what happens if a professor simply publishes the wrong material? As Ezra explains to Tessa about a colleague whom the university had essentially hired to write acerbic feminist works: “We’re no different from the folks who write for Vanity Fair. We need to publish, we need promotions, we need to make our reputations, we need to satisfy the commissars who pay our salaries and decide our fate. Susan was hired to be angry.” Earlier, a member of the tenure board had chastised Ezra for failing to deliver the deconstructionist articles that his superiors had hoped would give the college a little ‘reflected chic.” The novel, in the end, does some deconstructing of its own, revealing how academic labor is as much determined by the marketplace as pulp fiction. In addition to academia, the “infernal American PR machine” that elects Every Inch a Lady the “Flavor of the Month” also receives a wonderfully satiric treatment. Ezra is forced to stand idly by as his creation morphs from a small aberration in the pornographic publishing world to talk show fodder. Jay Leno quips that E.A. Peau is actually Salman Rushdie trying to write an inoffensive book, and Gwyneth Paltrow tells Barbara Walters that she would like to marry someone like Peau. As his book becomes the subject of a full-force witch-hunt, Ezra reckons that tabloid reporters are already at Beuhler “upholding the noble journalistic tradition: Exploit human misery.” When Ezra is appointed to head a Beuhler committee to discover E.A. Peau’s identity, he includes “Stylistic analysis by computer” on the group’s agenda, then thinks: “A clear bullshit suggestion, but it had a nice earnest ring to it. Some of the committee members might even take it seriously, God help them. After all, New York Magazine had done the same thing with Primary Colors, and impressed everybody by fingering Joel Klein.” Tarloff’s most impressive feat in The Man Who Wrote the Book may not be describing Ezra’s trip back from the brink, or the slowly developed love story with Carol, or insightful satire. Instead, it is the way that he gracefully blends all three without slighting any aspect of the tale. The result is a book that steadily gains momentum from the first page and begs the question: When will E.A. Peau release a sequel? To comment on this article, enter the Culture Clash section of the Pop Forum. Related Sites To purchase Read the entire work issue
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