About Harry Towns [Hardcover]

Bruce Jay Friedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1974

Bruce Jay Friedman has been hailed by critics as a comic genius, a writer whose vision confronts the malaise of contemporary life with a liberating deadpan humor. Grove Press is proud to reissue one of the classic novels by this acclaimed master of modern humor. About Harry Towns is the story of the eponymous screenwriter, a man reveling in the freewheeling atmosphere of the early 1970s, a bicoastal playboy with a broken marriage and a child he rarely sees. But when his perfectly constructed life begins to spin out of control, he must decide to pick up the scattered pieces of his past to begin anew. Praise for About Harry Towns: "A goddamn heartbreaking delight and you are a fool if you miss it. Friedman has created a character unique, haunting, and completely memorable in stories which tickle, depress, gouge below the belt and at second or third reading hold up as nothing less than a joy." -- The Washington Post Book World

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 180 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039448178X
• ISBN-13: 978-0394481784
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,809,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Screenwriter As Sensitive Thug, May 9, 2001

By 

Cort McMeel - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Harry Towns (Paperback)

Harry Towns is right out of the mouth of James Brown: "I'm a Greedy Man." He is a man who can feel sympathy for a wealthy coke dealer but want to smash in the head of a someone who tries to discipline his son. Harry Towns is a New Yorker who learns to appreciate LALA Land..he is open to experiences...he is open to coke, whores, various neuroses, random acts of violence, random acts of cowardice, all the while following a strict code of rules set up for the governance of Harry Towns...in a strange way like a noble bandit in a western, Harry Towns is governed by his own set of rules, which upon this reader's reflection are just, wise, humane and if a touch selfish serve to keep the bandit sane in a world of totalitarian, brutal, evil, materialistic and vacuous Good Citizens.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of the Artist as Aging Screenwriter, July 31, 2003

By 

Lee Hill - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Harry Towns (Paperback)

About Harry Towns is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It is also a profound look at an essentially decent, reasonably intelligent, if occasionally silly man adjusting to a world that has become a little more deranged while he has gone about the business of living. Bruce Jay Friedman manages to balance many moods - sadness, compassion, and optimism - in this very funny look at a screenwriter who wonders just how the hell he got to this strange place in his life. Read it and weep with laughter.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Proof positive that Bruce is a spanking fetishist, May 12, 2005

By 

Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Harry Towns (Paperback)

From ABOUT HARRY TOWNS: "Whoever heard of lettuce that had so much bite and spank and crunch to it?"

From ABOUT HARRY TOWNS: "One in particular would gather a small group of guests and show them spanking new rough cuts of feature-length films after first distributing old-fashioned candy bars that were a foot long."

Here's what the eminently spankadelic Martin Amis said about ABOUT HARRY TOWNS: "Bruce Jay Friedman is by contrast refreshingly unpretentious, though it will inevitably be added that he has plenty to be unpretentious about. ABOUT HARRY TOWNS is a third kind of Americanese, the walkabout novel: a discursive,anecdotal evocation of the urban male menopause. Harry is between divorces, rambling from LA to Vegas to NY, coping with his wife and his kid, and fending off the girls, the crabs and the blues. It is a book that needn't have been written, which is probably one of the reasons why it's so easy to read--fluent, droll and moderately likeable."

Regarding Martin's obligatory troika of adjectives: notice the British omission of a comma between the penultimate adjective and the final adjective. I happen to detest that practice more than life itself. And I can assure you that Bruce never hesitates to throw in a comma between the last 2 adjectives. Yes, he's that kinda guy.

Unfortunately, he's also an occasional kaelifying kinda guy. Remember when Pauline Kael threw a feces-fit about Dalton Trumbo's Eternal-Dignity-Of-Man shtick? Confere the following line from ABOUT HARRY TOWNS: "He sat down, stretched his legs, and tried to get Towns into a talk about the essential dignity of man, even man as he existed in the big city."