Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

"Joel Lingeman has it all: an overpaid sinecure advising Congress, a fifteen-year partnership with a perfectly adequate lover, a cozy circle of drinking buddies. Until one day his world implodes. His lover runs off, working for Congress threatens to turn him into a felon, and Joel is hurled back, out of condition, into the dating game he couldn't manage twenty years earlier." "Amid the rubble he finds himself clinging to an image from his boyhood: a model in a swimsuit ad, buried in the back of a magazine, who had beckoned to young Joel to step through the page and into another life. Aided by a detective who is more elusive than his quarry, Joel sets out to discover the real person he knows only from a fading photograph. What begins as a quest for an idyll in the New Mexico hills ends in New Jersey, where a rundown split-level turns out to be a shrine to everyday heroism and ordinary happiness." "Joel's journey overlays a critique of the cynicism and buffoonery of Capitol Hill and a ge