A Father's Kisses [Hardcover]

Bruce Jay Friedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 1996

With a daughter to support, recently unemployed, hard-working, and decent William Binny meets Valentine Peabody, who proposes that Binny become a paid assassin, and after much consideration, Binny decides to take on the job because the targets are horrible people. 30,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Middle American levelheadedness finds a hilarious new spokesman in William Binny, whose boredom and love for his daughter transform him from unemployed poultry worker into international hit man. Friedman's witty, beguiling slapstick is set?perhaps in central Arkansas?in a town "voted 'America's Third Friendliest City' by a spinoff of Forbes." Widower Binny, whose job was given away while he was trying to find himself on vacation in Czechoslovakia, spends his days minding the timer at the local tanning salon and breakfasting leisurely at Ed Bivens's diner, where he first meets Valentine Peabody, a standoffish, wealthy Brit visiting from Karachi. With his job gone, his wife dead and his best friend recently killed in an auto accident, Binny is lonely, bored, depressed and worried about providing for his 11-year-old daughter, Lettie. Already hoping to make Peabody his new friend, Binny gets more than he bargains for when Peabody offers to make him rich for killing the enemies of Peabody's mysterious billionaire employer. Friedman (A Mother's Kisses; The Lonely Guy's Book of Life, etc.) tells his story in the frank, editorializing voice of Binny, who, for all his foibles, is the novel's most stable character. Amid wacky plot twists, Binny mouths off about bigotry, political correctness, male bonding, fatherhood, showbiz and old-fashioned American family values, among other topics, in crisp prose imbued with Friedman's odd, distinctive comic sensibility. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Needing to support his beloved daughter, recent widower and part-time tanning salon worker William Binny naively accepts smooth-talking Valentine Peabody's six-figure offer to assassinate some alleged ne'er-do-wells who have offended Peabody's billionaire boss. By interweaving research from his nonfiction magazine articles, such as "My Prague" (Playboy, January 1, 1993) and "The Tan" (Rolling Stone, July 17, 1986), Friedman affects a surreal ambiance that is also present in his recent The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman (LJ 9/15/95). Though Binny is slow to catch on, the plot is predictable to the reader. Only polished writing and humor elevate this above Friedman's last novel, The Current Climate (LJ 8/89). For general readers with a penchant for ribald digressions and running jokes.?Robert P. Jordan, Univ. of Iowa
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 258 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult (September 16, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556114990
• ISBN-13: 978-1556114991
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,435,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It includes an obligatory semi-joke about prostate glands, April 25, 2005

By 

Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Father's Kisses (Hardcover)

From THE DICK by Bruce Jay Friedman: "Most remarkable of all was man's prostate gland. In an effort to eliminate all traces of sex and age, racket men would toss their victim into a shack and burn it to the ground. Yet the prostate never burned. Though all about it lay in cinders, the stalwart little gland would inevitably be found, vigorous, unvanquished, in mint condition, ready to sing to the high heavens about the victim's age, sex, and other evidential goodies."

From A FATHER'S KISSES by Bruce Jay Friedman: "Taking a seat in an overstuffed chair, I picked up one of the magazines that had been thoughtfully supplied by the management. As luck would have it, the feature article dealt with the unpredictability of the prostate gland, and after reading a few paragraphs, I saw that it tied in nicely with my theory of the role of the prostate gland in historical decision-making. Such leaders as the French general Joseph Gallieni and our own Ulysses S. Grant, for example, had suffered from this painful malady and often made questionable decisions because it had kicked up on them. Had the top British naval commander in the Revolutionary War--I forget his name--not had to be shipped back to London for treatment of his prostate woes, we might still be a colony today--and not a mighty nation. The author of the article did not have the advantage of knowing about any of that, but he did have a breezy style, and I was enjoying the article thoroughly when I became aware that the Moues had joined me on the landing."

Remember when Michael Herr made mention of a Vietnam-war soldier who had the nickname "SWINGIN' DICK" written on his helmet? (In full caps, no less.) Well, check out the following line from A FATHER'S KISSES: "A group of marchers wearing John Wayne masks sauntered by with Stetsons on their penises, carrying signs that said: BIG SWINGING DICKS." And what that is is nothing more than an innocent homage and I don't wanna hear anything more about it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, December 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Father's Kisses (Hardcover)

It's a shame that this is out of print, because it's the funniest book I've ever read. Nothing funny really happens in the book; the humor all lies in the droll narration. It's really unbelievable.