Showing Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler

David Schickler's debut Kissing in Manhattan seems at first to be a lot of fun: a gaggle of young Manhattanites with fancy jobs and fine educations chase each other around town, falling in love--or not as the case may be. In a series of linked stories, Schickler gives us a perverted heiress; a bumbling schoolteacher whose teenage student proposes marriage to him, a bad comic who finds his metier in off-off-Broadway theatre. The writing is somewhat willfully naïve: "Rally McWilliams was profoundly lonely", begins the title story. "She wanted to believe that she had a soul mate, a future spouse gestating somewhere in Nepal or the Australian Outback. But in Manhattan, where Rally lived, all she found were guys."

The mood turns dark, however, with the introduction of Patrick, a 30ish Wall Street trader who collects women and spends his evenings tying them up in his room. In short order the book's easy comedy torques into something more dramatic by Patrick's descent into violence. That Schickler doesn't play to his strengths is not necessarily a bad thing: one admires a writer who reaches beyond facility to something more difficult. But the transition from light-hearted sexual commentary to dirty realism is a bit bumpy. On the other hand, the novel's picture of a dark, desire-ridden Manhattan is an attractively seductive slice of escapism. The linked-stories format gives rise to a feeling of multiplicity, which is just the right tone for a book about a city crowded with pleasures. Describing James, a lovestruck young accountant, Schickler writes:

His mind tonight was on the fine and the illicit pleasures of the planet, on their merits and dispersement. Some people cut daisies, thought James. Some visit Wales, or choose cocaine, or dig latrines for the poor and the weak.

Everyone, it seems, is after something different. But it's desire itself that interests the author of Kissing in Manhattan. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com