Maxim
meets Friends
in this blithely irreverent story collection from British media's most unrepentant bad boy. Liddle, the former editor of a popular BBC radio show, recently aired the details of his rancorous divorce in the press; his journalist wife has also notoriously attacked him in print. All this comes as a fitting buildup to Liddle's debut, a collection of spicy, depraved tales loosely revolving around a clique of young Londoners who bungle their lives in pitifully sordid and vapid ways. Obsessed with the shallowest recesses of the male mind, Liddle makes much use of silly hyperbole that, while enjoyably frothy in spurts, should've been corralled by a tough editor. "The Long, Long Road to Uttoxeter" stretches thin as it chronicles the life-threatening depths to which a cheating man will sink while trying to deceive his wife. In "Sometimes Eating Marmite," yet another adulterer is spied in the act by an eclectic crowd of blips on the cultural radar; in "What the Thunder Said," a man shags his mother-in-law in the bushes while his wife fetches ice cream. Maybe this saucy set of tawdry tales will entertain bored commuters, but it won't satisfy anyone who's looking for something truly shocking from a bad boy: introspection. (Dec.)
Forecast:
Liddle's notoriety in the U.K. has yet to register in the U.S., which will make this a harder sell here.
