From Publishers Weekly
Novelist Carkeet (
Error of Our Ways) revisits the 1962 scandal of his Sonora, Calif., high school in this saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction.
Campus Sexpot was a sexy pulp novel that appeared in the author's small middle-class community when he was 15, reportedly written by a former Sonora high school teacher who fled to Mexico. The steamy roman à clef barely disguised the identity of the real characters involved in the affair between a newly arrived English teacher, Don Kaufield (aka the book's author, Dale Koby) and his 19-year-old, amply endowed student, Linda Franklin. In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years. Carkeet annotates excerpts from the novel, especially the seduction scenes between nubile, willing Linda and her married teacher ("I'll try not to interrupt anymore," promises Carkeet); he expands on notable characters and fills in prurient information. The first
Campus Sexpot ends with a heroic paean to the father-son relationship; Carkeet concludes similarly with a tribute to his upstanding father, who puzzled about people's choice of the dark side: "Why be bad when you can be good?"
(Sept. 26) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"A gloriously inventive, funny, piercing memoir of coming of age in a small Sierra town in the sixties. Using as a foil a pornographic potboiler set in the town, the author develops a wide range of feeling and observation—creative nonfiction at its best.”--Suzannah Lessard, author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
"Hilarious, bizarre, intricate, poignant, piercing, startlingly honest, eyepoppingly funny, and ultimately, to the reader's surprise and delight, a book not about lust but very much about love, mysterious and miraculous. A riveting book.”--Brian Doyle, author of Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies
“Carkeet has a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest and most entertaining comic writers working today. In Campus Sexpot, his first memoir, Carkeet turns his attention to small-town America, to the strangeness and hilarity of SEX, and to the fascinating and beautifully observed contradictions that lie at the center of family life. Campus Sexpot is an addictive joy to read."--John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake
"A fun read that feels a lot more like a novel than the memoir that it is."--Blue Ridge Business Journal
"[A] saucy, fanciful slice of creative nonfiction . . . In a nimble narrative, Carkeet transforms the reading of his first smutty book into a shrimpy boy's sexual initiation during the buttoned-up Kennedy years.”--Publishers Weekly
"Campus Sexpot is a hilarious tour through the embarrassment of adolescence and small-town families. For female readers, it's also an education on American boyhood."--J. Gordon, Nighttimes
"[Carkeet] knows to milk a joke and then fix without flinching on the sad human dramas fueling them."--East Bay Express
"Memoirs are, by definition, unique in their content. But leave it to David Carkeet, former St. Louisan and novelist extraordinaire, to take the form a step further with his own inventive coming-of-age story. . . . Campus Sexpot does not disappoint.”--St. Louis Post-Dispatch
