cover image CAD: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor

CAD: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor

Rick Marin, . . Hyperion, $23.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-7868-6882-7

In this withering account of one man's travels in dateland, journalist Marin visits an insane asylum, spends a year as a gourmand yuppie, woos a recent college graduate with Pop-Tarts and comes on to a teenage celebrity. And those are his tamer anecdotes. Marin, who starts his tear in the early 1990s after separating from his wife, also pursues a writing career that has him interviewing B-list celebrities like Vanilla Ice. As he cruises through his 20- and 30-something years (and most of the single women) in New York, Marin tells an episodic tale that's more than the sum of its hilarious parts—he also evokes a male psyche that's pulsating with provocative nuggets. (On honesty: "Women blame men for acting fake.... But women are the ones speeding from zero to intimacy like a Ferrari. Which is more artificial?") In the hands of a lesser writer, the book could have been merely a self-indulgent series of diary entries. But Marin's comic timing, insight and self-deprecation vault it to something greater. Marin has achieved the most elusive of literature's paradoxes: a deep and complicated exploration of the superficial. Men and women should be equally enthralled by the portrait of someone torn between finding the right woman and finding the right-now woman. That there's a happy—but not Nutrasweet—ending only reinforces the image of a real person in all his messy and comic humanity. (Feb. 14)

Forecast:Are readers itching for a Sex in the City for guys? Hyperion hopes so; it plans Valentine's Day promos and will probably get major review coverage in both men's and women's magazines.