Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor [Hardcover]

Rick Marin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2003

You know him. He's the funny, sweet guy with the great eyes who asks you a million questions and seems mesmerized by every reply. He takes you on the greatest, longest date of your life. He swears he loves cats and cuddling. And his apartment is so clean. He just might be the One.

Then he doesn't call, doesn't write. He sees you coming down the street and he hides behind a tree. He's a cad. And this is his story. After all the girl's guides to sex in the city, here -- at last -- is the view from the other side of the bed. In Cad: Confessions of Toxic Bachelor, Rick Marin offers himself up for an in-depth look at man's superficial nature.

At 28, a brief, doomed first marriage thrusts him back into Bachelor Hell. A journalist as eager to make it in Manhattan as with its female population, our emotionally myopic hero can never seem to tell if the woman in front of him is too crazy or too sane, until she gets too close. Falling out of love as often as he falls in, he vows more than once to clean up his act, only to relapse into another bender of beauties, blow-offs and bad behavior -- all in desperate pursuit of the woman who can redeem him.

In this rollicking, frequently insensitive and ultimately poignant memoir, Marin proves a master of the light touch even in his darkest hours. Part Hugh Hefner, part Hugh Grant, his tale is a rake's progress (in spite of himself) from incorrigible cad to reconstructed romantic. It is one man's story, but many men will read it as their own. And for any woman who has ever wondered, "What was he thinking?" This is what he was thinking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the mildly entertaining memoir Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, former New York Times reporter and pop-culture critic Rick Marin chronicles the years of marathon dating and shallow living that followed in the wake of his failed "starter marriage." Marin moves through a series of urbane exploits and short-lived affairs, perfecting his trademark move of whipping off his horn-rims midconversation in a "myopic gaze," holding court with his wingman Tad over the hot buffet at Billy's Topless, and regurgitating wisdom gleaned from The Godfather. Like the similarly self-indulgent How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Cad has its memorable moments--Marin comparing his wedding video to the Zapruder film and hitting on actress Moira Kelly when she was still an ingénue living with her mom on Long Island--but the book's swinging, ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack attitude feels noticeably forced and uninspired, leaving a flat aftertaste to the whole affair. --Brad Thomas Parsons

From Publishers Weekly

In this withering account of one man's travels in dateland, journalist Marin visits an insane asylum, spends a year as a gourmand yuppie, woos a recent college graduate with Pop-Tarts and comes on to a teenage celebrity. And those are his tamer anecdotes. Marin, who starts his tear in the early 1990s after separating from his wife, also pursues a writing career that has him interviewing B-list celebrities like Vanilla Ice. As he cruises through his 20- and 30-something years (and most of the single women) in New York, Marin tells an episodic tale that's more than the sum of its hilarious parts-he also evokes a male psyche that's pulsating with provocative nuggets. (On honesty: "Women blame men for acting fake.... But women are the ones speeding from zero to intimacy like a Ferrari. Which is more artificial?") In the hands of a lesser writer, the book could have been merely a self-indulgent series of diary entries. But Marin's comic timing, insight and self-deprecation vault it to something greater. Marin has achieved the most elusive of literature's paradoxes: a deep and complicated exploration of the superficial. Men and women should be equally enthralled by the portrait of someone torn between finding the right woman and finding the right-now woman. That there's a happy-but not Nutrasweet-ending only reinforces the image of a real person in all his messy and comic humanity.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1 edition (February 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786868821
• ISBN-13: 978-0786868827
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,476,217 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Zero stars, August 17, 2005

By 

city girl (Manhattan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor (Hardcover)

Rick Marin tells Elisabeth, his girlfriend of three months, that his visa is about to expire and that, unless he gets a green card, he will have to go back to Canada. She offers to marry him, an action that most decent people would consider an extremely generous gesture. As a thank you to the woman who allowed him to stay -and have a career- in the US, Marin bashes her and tries to portray her as a raving lunatic. Exhibit A of her insanity: She is not happy to have to relocate to Washington, DC, after he gets a job there. Exhibit B: She wants to move back home, to Oklahoma. Oh, yes, she's also moody and seems unhappy to be married to him - a balding guy who looks like Millhouse from the Simpsons, has a series of sad jobs and still depends on financial support from mommy and daddy. Please, someone get a straight jacket for this woman!

Despite all this "insanity," Marin doesn't leave Elisabeth. It is she who dumps him for another guy (which, in my opinion, shows she's about the smartest person in the book.)

He then uses his failed marriage as "material" to get women's sympathy and get them into bed. As pathetic as this is, I can't say I blame him. After all, you've got to use what you have and Marin - well, he's got nothing.

So here comes the long, and very dull, list of his encounters with women. There is Kim, a girl he meets in Halifax who takes him up on his invitation and travels to New York. When she tells him she likes being close to him, he assumes she wants to marry him: "She was already on our honeymoon," he writes. (Why is it that the men with the tiniest lives and fewest accomplishments tend to have the biggest egos?) When the same girl, who has crossed the Ocean to visit him, is hurt that he's dating other people, he accuses her "of speeding from zero to intimacy like a Ferrari," but when a guy calls a woman he's been out with on three dates, he acts all offended.

There is Tiina, a girl he compares to Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction." (No, she hasn't boiled any rabbits or done pretty much anything else, except get upset when he breaks-up with her over the phone). Kay, a beautiful and rich girl he ends up dumping for being "too normal." Tabitha, an intern who becomes his SOG (Sort-of Girlfriend), since she is too young to be the real thing. (There are others, but it's all too boring to recount.) And Ilene, the woman he finally falls for, who spent $100,000 in therapy trying to get over a boyfriend she broke up with three years before, and whose main virtue seems to be that she sees right through Marin's lame lines.

In the whole book, there is just one (unintentionally) funny line: "My issue was that I had no issues," Marin writes. Right. And you also look like Brad Pitt.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Male Chauvinist Pig, October 1, 2005

By 

sleepy in DC - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor (Hardcover)

I wish I had found this review, written by an English journalist called Matthew Condon, before I read Cad:

"A few chapters into Marin's memoir and two things immediately wafted from the pages. Firstly, I hadn't been so ashamed to be a male since I split my pants at a fashionable nightclub some years ago. And, secondly, I could smell a rat. And a few other things, too, but we'll uphold our moral character.
This book... would have to be one of the most puerile, narcissistic, misogynistic, crass, boring and blatant money-grabbing wing-dings in the history of recent publishing.
It not only reeks of rats and bland secretions, but also reflects the sad and sorry state of our culture when a trend-conscious, lightweight scam artist can have the audacity to write what is claimed to be a memoir, yet is nothing more than a string of poorly strung-together dentist-room magazine columns, and send it out into the world as a pseudo-psychological study into modern male behaviour.
Indeed, Con, not Cad, would have been a more accurate title."

Actually, I think Male Chauvinist Pig would have been a much more accurate title, but otherwise I completely agree with Matthew Condon. I'm just happy I bought a used copy of this book, so its narcissistic, misogynistic, crass and boring author didn't earn one cent from my purchase.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible, July 17, 2005

By 

Sophie (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor (Hardcover)

If you really want to read a book by an obnoxious, arrogant (bordering on delusional) and unattractive man, I suggest you pick up a copy of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Its author, Toby Young, shares all those characteristics with Rick Marin, but he also has a sense of humor, which makes How to... a hilarious book, well worth-reading. Cad, on the other hand, is just terrible.