Customer Reviews

About Harry Towns

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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.

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.

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."