Eleven Karens: A Novel [Hardcover]

Peter Lefcourt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 24, 2002

Not since Flaubert's L'éducation sentimentale has a novel so vividly described man's helplessness in the face of woman. In this tale of sexual education, the narrator recounts his experiences with eleven fascinating women -- all of whom happen to be named Karen.

In an attempt to explain this statistical anomaly, he takes us on a journey that begins in the fifth grade when he is the groom at his own shotgun wedding. He survives this ritual sacrifice to go on to his other Karens: a high school cheerleader who teaches him how to run the bases, a young disciple of Margaret Mead whom he meets playing volleyball in a nudist camp in Pennsylvania, a lovely Italian woman with Monica Vitti eyes who steals his heart on the Via Appia Antica in Rome, a statuesque African capitalist who literally takes the shirt off his back in Togo, a sexually confused waitress who appropriates his sperm in Quebec, and a boozy southern actress in L.A. who can't decide whether she is Vivien Leigh or Joan Collins.

From each of his Karens he learns about women and life. And as he gets older, though not necessarily wiser, he marches on intrepidly to confront the next Karen who inexorably crosses his path.

Eleven Karens is both a coming-of-age story and a touching homage to women -- a funny and tender tale told in the delightfully cracked voice of one of the most unusual comic novelists writing today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Freud, who considered repetitive behavior the key to both human sexuality and the "death instinct," would have a field day with the narrator of Lefcourt's novel. This unnamed stand-in for the author ("Mr. L-") ponders the uncanny number of Karens in his love life and weaves around them a traditional tale of the writer's apprenticeship. Mr. L is a New York City baby boomer who participates in many of the rites of that generation, from frantic draft avoidance and ownership of the inevitable VW bug to "impersonal... pre-AIDS sex." Among his Karens are a nudist anthropologist; a Togo businesswoman he meets while serving in the Peace Corps; a blind, suicidal poet; and a Scrabble enthusiast who showers on stage at a strip joint. Freud would wisely note that each of these romances begins in slightly zany circumstances and ends in disappointment, the common destiny of the fetishist. Mr. L begins as a wannabe writer of great American novels, resorts to grinding out porno potboilers and winds up as a Hollywood screenwriter. In one sense, the multitudinous Karens are his muses, but they stand more for transience than transcendence: "I think about my Karens, scattered to the winds and connected only by my imperfect memory. I wonder what books they would write if they chose to, and what memories they have of our time together." While few things are less amusing than a middle-aged man waxing maudlin about his past cocksmanship, Lefcourt's characteristically quirky novel (Di and I, etc.) is a graceful coda to the broken promise of sexual happiness.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Here is a novel from the author of The Woody with a theme of no great profundity and a uniquely piecemeal manner of telling-a jumble of episodic squirming libidos, coupling and uncoupling, and a general juvenile slobbering over sex. In the full flush of youth during the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, the first-person narrator happens to have encountered an inordinate number-11-of Karens of a very willing nature. After playing Spin the Bottle and Post Office with his first Karen and almost marrying her at the age of ten and a half, in no time flat he progresses to less innocuous sexual encounters and goes the way of all flesh with ten ready-for-anything Karens over three decades. This catalog of conquests is far from unreadable, and there is enough action in it to keep you alert most of the time, but after our profligate youth and Karen number eight or nine have done their things, a touch of ennui, a tired droop, sets in. To reveal the climax would be unpardonable, but it ends with a bang. An optional choice for larger fiction collections.
A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (December 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684870347
• ISBN-13: 978-0684870342
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,692,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Lefcourt


Peter Lefcourt is a refugee from the trenches of Hollywood, where he has distinguished himself as a writer and producer of film and television. Among his credits are "Cagney and Lacey," for which he won an Emmy award; "Monte Carlo," in which he managed to keep Joan Collins in the same wardrobe for 35 pages; the relentlessly sentimental "Danielle Steel's Fine Things," and the underrated and hurried "The Women of Windsor," the most sordid, and thankfully last, miniseries about the British Royal Family.

He began writing novels after being declared "marginally unemployable" in the entertainment business by his agent. In 1991 Lefcourt published "The Deal"--an act of supreme hubris that effectively bit the hand that fed him and produced, in that wonderfully inverse and masochistic logic of Hollywood, a fresh demand for his screenwriting services. It remains a cult favorite in Hollywood and was one of the ten books that the late John Gotti reportedly ordered from jail.

Subsequently he has divided his time between screenplays and novels, publishing "The Dreyfus Affair" in 1992, his darkly comic look at homophobia in baseball as a historical analog to anti-Semitism in fin de siecle France, whose film rights The Walt Disney Company has optioned twice and let lapse twice in paroxysms of anxiety about what it says about the national pastime and, by extension, Disneyland.

In 1994, he published "Di And I," a heavily fictionalized version of his love affair with the late Princess of Wales. Princess Diana's own step-godmother, the late Barbara Cartland, herself no slouch when it came to publishing torrid books, declared the book "ghastly and unnecessary," which pushed the British edition briefly onto the bestseller lists. "Di And I" was optioned by Fine Line Pictures and was abandoned after Diana's untimely death.

"Abbreviating Ernie," his fourth novel, was inspired by his brush with notoriety after the appearance of "Di And I." At the time he was harassed by the British tabloids and spent seven excruciating minutes on "Entertainment Tonight." He was subsequently and fittingly bumped out of People Magazine by O.J. Simpson's white Bronco media event of June, 1994.

Lefcourt's research on a movie about the 1995 Bob Packwood scandal was the germ for his fifth novel, "The Woody." He saw the former senator's battle with the Senate Ethics Committee as evidence of the confusion in America regarding appropriate sexual behavior for politicians. Packwood became a sacrificial lamb by getting his dick caught in the buzzsaw of the zeitgeist.

His subsequent book, "Eleven Karens"--an erratically erotic fictional memoir of his love affairs with eleven women, all of whom happened to be named Karen, was published in 2003. He is still defending himself in a number of law suits brought by several of the apparently insufficiently fictionalized Karens.

He followed that with "The Manhattan Beach Project," a nominal sequel to The Deal, in that it follows the adventures of that book's hero, the intrepid Charlie Berns, who finds himself broke and attending meetings of the Brentwood chapter of Debtors Anonymous. Charlie manages to sell a reality TV show about the daily life of a warlord in Uzbekistan ("The Sopranos" meets "The Osbournes") to a secret division of ABC, named, appropriately, ABCD, charged with developing extreme reality TV series from a clandestine skunkworks in Manhattan Beach.

His latest book is entitled "An American Family," and it tells the story of an immigrant Jewish-American family on Long Island, beginning on the day John Kennedy was shot and ending the day before 9/11. This multi-generational saga, told from the point of view of five siblings born in the 1940's, traces the Pearl family's odyssey into the melting pot of twentieth century America.

He continues to dabble in film and television. He was the writer/creator of the Showtime TV series, "Beggars & Choosers," a darkly comic send-up of the television business. More recently, he spent a season in the writers' room of "Desperate Housewives," where he helped concoct some of the Byzantine plot lines of that infamous dark suburban soap opera.

Praise for Lefcourt's novels:

"You can count the wonderful novels about Hollywood on two hands...The Deal is one of them."
--LA Times

"...A hilarious romp through the world of national politics. [Lefcourt's] hapless hero is the perfect foil for all that's gone wrong in Washington...An irreverent, amusing read."
--USA Today

"This neon farce lights up the political spectrum to the left and the right of the primary colors...The Woody is like the best of farces, less interested in mocking historical figures and more keen to turn its light elsewhere."
--LA Times

"A good-natured romp through the dream factory of the 1990's."
--The New York Times

"Lefcourt flirts with offensiveness but never goes all the way."
----Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hysterically funny, witty and very very Lefcourt!, March 11, 2003

By 

P. Indrome "Coffee Fanatic" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eleven Karens: A Novel (Hardcover)

The book takes us through the life of a man who always seems to end up in the arms of a woman named Karen. They are eccentric Italian beauties, upper east side lolitas, nudists, you name it and there's a karen that fits the bill in this wonderfully light and truely well written piece.

Peter Lefcourt has this amazing ability to tell these stories that you couldn't imagine yourself buying someone told you about them but he writes so well that not only do you buy it but it sticks with you and you find yourself laughing out loud months after you've put it down.

If you enjoyed 'Di and I', 'The Woody' or 'The Deal', Amazon.com 'Eleven Karens' today, you'll love it!

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Real Disappointment, August 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Eleven Karens: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lefcourt has such talent. His previous work has been witty, intelligent, and hysterically funny.

Unfortunately, Eleven Karens reads as nothing more than Lefcourt's personal ... fantasies, with each Karen possessing a perfect and willing body. Lefcourt's fantasized boundless appeal to any woman he desires had me shaking my head in disbelief. This ... drivel reaches a new low by tossing in [physical] scene featuring not one, but two Karens at a time. If an explicitly described threesome is not what you had in mind, skip this book. Softcore porn is not what I was expecting from Lefcourt.

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, funny and profound, February 16, 2005

By 

greg "Storyteller" (Tampa, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Eleven Karens: A Novel (Hardcover)

Eleven Karens has a brilliant structure for a memoir: a sexual life told through 11 encounters with women all named Karen. Beautifully told, funny as hell and deeply profound, 11K is a globe-trotting rollicking tale of fleeting love and wistful memories. If you love Lefcourt's other works, seek this out. If you never read him before, you cannot go wrong here. Tragicly, Simon and Schuster dumped this on the market with no publicity. But if you find it, you will treasure Eleven Karens.