Customer Reviews

Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I bought this book for my husband (not that he is a cad by any definition) and wound up reading it myself. Based on the gushing on the dustjacket, I expected "Cad" to really blow the lid off the whole dating ritual/mess and instead got a series of vignettes about one (usually neurotic) woman after another. As for this book being a tool to understand the male psyche, please..there's nothing new here. I never really got Richard's motivations other than he was bored, noncommittal, and into the chase. Gee, tell us something we women don't already know from reading all those silly women's magazines that the main character himself wrote for!

I enjoyed Marin's writing but was about halfway through when it finally dawned on me that this book wasn't really *going* anywhere. I started losing track of which woman was which. I started feeling like I was reading a thinly-veiled autobiography of a guy who was probably pretty geeky as a kid and now fancied himself a playah.

Oh! And he messed up on some time-related details...the first Austin Powers movie didn't come out until 1997, and Carolyn Bessette didn't marry JFK Jr. until 1996! References to both are made in this chapter which begins January 1995. Maybe *a lot* of time elapsed in that chapter, or maybe it's sloppy fact-checking (kind of ironic when the whole book revolves around publishing and media!)

Maybe if I'd lived in NYC I would have appreciated this more - but after reading this I felt the same way I do after seeing Sex in the City - intrigued by the hype, but ultimately not really caring about these couture-clad name-droppers. (The only people in the book I really cared about were Rick's parents!)

Good, light read to take with you on the commute, to the beach, etc. but don't expect to see any epiphanies about male-female relationships in here. And don't expect a really toxic cad either - while this guy had his caddish moments, he really is no different than the average, confused single guy out there who asks for your number and then never calls. <shrug>

I noticed that Amazon has paired this book with How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. I hope this author is married by now because no one who has read this book would ever date him, not because he's a cad, but because he's clearly dishonest. One look a the photo on the book jacket will tell you that this guy is not in the habit of dating beautiful women, although perhaps he tries and tries again. His self-indulgent tales of one woman after another throwing themselves at the irresistible hipster-doofus writer with a seemingly inexhaustible number of esoteric references lack the detail that actual experience would have allowed, and which would have made those tales far more interesting. The funniest stories in the book are of his encounters with celebrities, a status that he would clearly relish if not for his Canadian mediocrity. Because this memoir is clearly fiction, the book lacks any depth at all, another reason you should never read autobiographies. Memoirs always have an agenda, and its not thoughtful analysis of one's life.

I found this book depressing in an unenlightening way. Aren't "cads" supposed to be charming and, well, good looking (I saw him interviewed on TV)? I was expecting something fun and sexy but this book is about a judgemental creep with terrible values. That can be interesting. See Bret Easton Ellis or early Jay McInerney but I always got the feeling those guys knew what they were.Marin seems clueless. Could be redeemed by Hugh Grant starring in movie version. There's a cad who deserves the moniker.

If publishers want to make this book a little believable, they should take Marin's photo off the jacket. If the author looked like George Clooney, I would understand why some women would want to sleep with him. But Marin is not only dull, self-centered and vain - he's also ugly. A pathetic account from a wanna-be cad.

This might be Rick Marin's male answer to "Sex and the City." I think what Marin is trying to do with this book is show that men can be the flighty, fickle, and fake ones in the world. It's not an impressive read.

The book explores his exploits among New York's women from the point of view of a (supposedly) attractive Latin-Canadian. Marin's "Reference Train" is dated and out-of-touch. He discounts women because they have "bad shoes," or faces like the Easter Island statues, and when he likes a woman, it's because she has "good shoes" and doesn't take crap from him. Sex is a card he plays when he wants to.

Overall, unimpressive, not worth the money. If you must read it, try the library's copy.

After reading Cad, I wondered who on earth would sleep with this man?
It's true that there are many more single women in NY than single men, so a lot of girls in the city have at some point or another gone out with a guy who is, to put it charitably, not very attractive. Still, Marin's book photo shows him to be really, really (really) ugly, and studio headshots are almost always very flattering to their subjects, so just imagine what he looks like in real life. For that reason, when I started reading the book, I assumed Marin must be very successful, charming and intelligent. Or at least one of the three. Boy, was I wrong.
I doubt all the stories in the book are true (Heath Ledger as Casanova, I buy; Rick Marin, no way), but let's say a fraction of them are. Who are these women? Who would sleep with, let alone date, let alone fall for someone so horrible, on the inside and out? The same kind of woman who marries a guy who's in jail for life, whose self esteem is so low that anyone with a penis and a pulse will do?
I was curious enough to do a little research and found this article, from one of those girls. I then realized that some of them were some completely normal, intelligent women who simply made a mistake, which Marin assumed to be a reflection of his personality and looks. I can tell you it's not, and this book is as unlikable as his author. Buying it would be a mistake you'll also regret.

'He never called me again': a British victim writes

In the 1990s, while I was living in New York, a friend introduced me to Rick Marin (...) Over the next year or two we became, I thought, friends. We went out to the movies, to dinner, to parties. We told each other about the people we were dating, and he said flattering things about my prose style. A recurrent theme in his conversation - one to which I should have paid more attention - was the craziness of Manhattan women, with the flattering implication that I was exempt from the general rule; he once congratulated me on being one of the three women in New York who wasn't in therapy.

One night, in the sort of accident that can happen after a night in a well-stocked bar, I thought, "What the hell? We're both grown-ups. What harm can it do?" and went to bed with him. The sex was the sort that is likely to result after 12 cocktails and two jugs of sangria, but I thought of it as if I was in a French comedy, where adults sleep together casually, almost as a form of exercise. I didn't think it meant anything; I didn't expect him to fall in love with me. But nor did I expect never to hear from him again - which is exactly what happened.

One "crazy lady" story he told me, and which now came back to me with dismaying clarity, was about a woman he knew who'd called him up and said, "We used to be friends, what happened?" "I slept with her once. That doesn't make us friends," was how he saw it. So now I was faced with the choice of persisting in trying to revive our "friendship" and being classified as another bunny-boiler, or giving up and facing the fact it had never existed. I had been set up: he'd probably never liked me, or my prose style. He had just been biding his time.

Ah yes.....how wonderful it is to know that writers backed with ivy league MAs in Journalism or English and some family connections or a few lucky breaks through the literary world can join the lifestyles of the rich and famous.... men who can give up their nine to five jobs because they have the luxury to write stories about disrespecting women and playing head games with women and make money from it; enough to boast about their past conquests and new found fame and how their book is to be an insight into the male psyche for male and female readers a like; How entralling it is for us all to read about rubbing shoulders and elbows with B-list and now A-list celebrities;

CAD reminds me of the new genre of literature out there: akin to reality tv but reality literature; where authors can write about their foibles because they already lead lives a notch above the reader trampling about with Manhattan up and coming socialities and gallavanting at dinner parties in the Hamptons;

Would anybody care to read about some working poor or middle class Average guy's exploits with women in Iowa or Manitoba or Indiana who works some everyday job and socializes with folks who most of us pass by on the street everyday or who take public transportation to get to work? Would his maltreatment of women receive the same notorious accolades or would the women themselves appear as exciting if they sold cosmetics at some discount drug chain rather than own restaurants or be medical students.

After reading CAD I went back to my first love which is reading non-fiction.

The whole onslaught of navel gazing, poor me and I had a metamorphisis life changing experience that helped me turn a new leaf reminds me too much of the new trend in our society: reality tv/reality media/reality literature...but for most readers it does not depict their real life reality and that is why there is a market for that genre of entertainment-whether it take the form of a novel or television game show.

Personally, I wish Joe Canadian was a real guy. I think I would have far more enjoyed his take on women since those beer commercials made me more proud to be a Canadian than the reality self-engrossed-money making-sex sells writing that a former Canadian shared in his part memoir/part fictional novel CAD.