Larry Wyler is a man in conflict. He knows what makes him happy — the St Matthew Passion, sex, a beef sirloin ‘slightly charred on the outside and reddish pink in the middle, nicely peppered, with mustard aioli’. But he has all these things in his little Minnesotan life: he met his wife singing Bach; they have great sex; they eat good steak. It is not enough. Aspiring writer Larry wants more. He wants New York. His dream, in fact, is ‘to work at the New Yorker and go to lunch at the Algonquin with Mr Shawn’.
Well Larry gets his ‘dream’, or something like it, and Love Me is a hilariously moving account of it. Larry is possibly the funniest literary creation of recent years, but locked as he is in a struggle between two selves, his plight also verges on the tragic.
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