Fiction

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Tom Violet has failed, once again, to have sex with his wife. And that’s not the worst of it. Besides his latest false start in the bedroom, there’s the 9-5 office job that’s slowly crushing his spirit, his lovelorn stepfather who’s in constant need of counsel, and the strange realization that his boozy stepmother is sort of stalking him. Then, of course, there’s his own inappropriate crush on a 23-year-old colleague, the growing suspicion that his wife is having an affair with someone from her gym, and the family dog, Hank, who suffers from acute anxiety. And then there’s the novel—the one he’s been slaving over for years, all the while haunted by the fear that it will never see the light of day. Too young to have these kinds of problems, but too old to see any easy way out, Tom finds himself mired in hopeless inaction. And then his philandering, borderline-estranged father, Curtis, shows up in the middle of the night and tells him: a) that he’s just been thrown out of his own house by wife #3; b) that he’ll be moving in with Tom for who knows how long; and c) that he’s just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Pushed to the brink, Tom decides to take things in an entirely different direction by enacting a series of truly stupid plans for revenge and self-improvement that, of course, go completely haywire.