Men, Women & Children

May 9, 2011
After two novels of puerile juvenilia, Kultgen (The Average American Male) expands his horizons a little in this sometimes thoughtful account of a group of junior high classmates and their screwed-up parents. Among the sprawling cast is the Truby family: parents stuck in a sexless dead-end marriage while son Chris drifts deeper into dependence on strange porn. Then there's Chris's classmate, Tim Mooney, who quits the football team to devote more time to video games, and Hannah Clint, a classmate and aspiring actress whose résumé Web site begins drawing a pedophile fan base, to her mother's misguided enthusiasm ("there might be an opportunity to turn the web site into a business," she reasons). Kultgen is an artless writerâthe prose reads like an instruction manual, and his characters are little more than the sum of their perversionsâbut he does manage to pose questions about the things men will never admit to thinking, and about the dark side of the Internet and its effects on interpersonal relationships; it's too bad they're coated in salacious narrative slop.

June 1, 2011
With The Average American Male (2007) and The Lie (2009), Kultgen earned a cult following as an audacious, candid chronicler of broken hearts and pop culture. His new novel explores private obsessions and secret lives in the age of the Internet and reality TV. Kultgen's is a comic world, in which 13-year-olds play World of Warcraft and study Chomsky, men rush home to masturbate on lunch break, and women join websites, looking for extramarital affairs. When Tim Mooney, star linebacker for his junior-high football team, undergoes an existential crisis and quits, numerous classmates, teammates, and parents scramble to figure out their own lives. Coach Quinn wants a winning season so he can coach high school. Hannah Clint, a cheerleader whose mother failed at stardom, appears in compromising outfits on a salacious website. And quarterback Danny Vance's fear of sex intensifies when he receives a box of condoms from his father. Kultgen's style and content verge on the juvenile, but his observations into how people become corrupted and needy are funny and moving.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)