Customer Reviews

The Great Kisser

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Wow. David Evanier is truly a great writer. The picture he creates is clear. The words-everyone carefully poignant - and rich dialogue make up this interesting gang of short stories I consider classics in every sense. You may compare Evanier to the short list of writers who tell great stories in very few words, every word counting. It's a book to read slowly, and, if you are an old time New Yorker, it is all the sweeter.

I'd say this book was the story of my life exactly, but it's not the story of my life at all. It's honest without being a bore. It's funny without being a charade. It's brave without attitude. It's just what I want in a book. It's also just what I almost never find.

Here's a sample of the text. It's unfair, really to pull it out of the context of the story, but I wanted you to read it, hear it.

" I loved them all and they loved me and they made me grasp life, even if I could
not hold on to it. But I could never hold on to despair because of them. All People
of the Book who stepped out of history to hold me and embrace me and not let me
fall. Why have I been so lucky in this life, this Jew who came after the Holocaust--
the world had expended its Jew hatred for a while, having gotten it out of its system--
and seen such bountiful goodness, so much beauty, totally unsuitable beauty to make
literature out of because it is unbelievable--so incredible it would be pointless to try
to write a story about it."

David Evanier has written a story about it. A collection of stories. Terrific stories.

...or so believes the narrator, Michael, when his psychiatrist bequeaths him the tapes of their therapy sessions--spanning 30 years! While the thought of revisiting the painful times of our lives may be horrifying to most, Michael embraces the opportunity and, "listening to the forgotten tapes, I measure what is real to me now against what was real to me then."

And that line illustrates, for me, what is one of the hands-down strengths of this fine book: on a sentence-to-sentence basis, this is poignant and heartfelt writing. The language is economical, unadorned and yet packed with emotion--nostalgia and loss and gratitude and the multitude of conflicting feelings that tangle around our memories.

Except this is not memory, simply. Because memory is colored by our experience and our perceptions as we age; memory is naturally distorted. Only so much distortion can take place, however, when we are confronted by our own voice revealing what happened and what we felt ten, twenty, thirty years ago.

The protagonist here takes on each character, each event from his past as if he were living it today. It is past tense and yet immediate. We are right there with Michael--in New York, in Vancouver, wherever--soaking up the scenery and facing each character from his life right along with him, albeit with the added wisdom of age.

Evanier's deft prose highlights the complexities and paradoxes universal in all human beings, but what's special here is that the characters are illuminated through Michael's changing perceptions. I'm thinking, for example, of the quite troubled wife, Karen, who at times seems his destruction and at other times his salvation.

There is so much to be admired in this slim book, one which ultimately feels like a love letter to all those who have peopled Michael's eventful life.

I hadn't read Evanier before...what a mistake that turns out to be!

The Great Kisser by David Evanier (Rager Media, 2006)
David Evanier has been a writer all his life... He is the author of The One Star Jew, Red Love (a novelization of the life and times of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) and dozens of stories, reviews and essays published in leading literary journals. He has also written for New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Magazine.
In addition to his literary work, David has also written several wonderful biographies, most prominent among them: Making The Wise Guys Weep--The Jimmy Roselli Story, and Roman Candle, The Life of Bobby Darin.

David calls The Great Kisser, a "novel in stories". And it is more or less just that. It's a collection of short and long stories, which don't always proceed in particularly chronological order but follow a different sort of time line--the time line of the heart.
This book is really a memoir, with only a few changes of name, place and date. It's at once the story of a boy, then a man, searching desperately for the kind of genuine love he never got as a child, and also the story of a born artist, a writer; someone, who no matter what other jobs or careers he ever attempted was never meant to be anything but a writer.
The stories move back and forth in time and place--but cover everything from his childhood in the forties and fifties up to the present moment... They travel from Queens to Manhattan, to Vancouver, back to Manhattan, out to Los Angeles (for a long, hard attempt at screenwriting) and finally back to New York.
The book is full of bizarre and fascinating characters; geniuses and charlatans; real and would-be gangsters; cracked literary agents, bigoted, hysterical do-gooders and a large assemblage of lost, crazy and inspired artists that Michael Goldberg (David's novelized namesake) meets on his journeys.
Of all the sad, brilliant and hilarious characters Michael encounters in his travels, by far the most fascinating is his long-time psychiatrist who, in his deranged old age, gives Michael decades of their taped therapy sessions. In fact, that's the way the book starts--with Michael beginning to listen to these thousand-and-one nights of analysis and personal revelation.
David/Michael, in this life story, writes with a kind of vicious, longing honesty about his horribly needy and destructive parents.
Not unlike a great many other people in this sad, spinning world, he spends the better part of his life trying to free himself from the chains of his parents' terrible love--it's an omnipresent plot, sub-plot and super-plot throughout the book...
Michael falls in love, in lust, chases after numerous women, engages in doomed affairs and, when teaching in Vancouver, meets the woman he will one day marry. Their long, troubled and passionate relationship is, in fact, what finally carries the torch of redemption to the finish line of the book.
The Great Kisser is compulsively readable. David/Michael's desperation leaps right from his heart to yours and you often find yourself saying, "I can't take this stuff any more-- But still, I have to know what happens next." There is always a feeling of compassion you have for this character. You find yourself, no matter how much he screws up or lurches around in a selfish frenzy, rooting for him to succeed, both in his attempts to make it as a writer and finally discover true love. His greatest virtue is that no matter what disasters befall him, he never, never stops trying.

Mike Feder
Sirius Satellite Radio

Beautifully written short stories about a young writer growing up in New York. Perceptive, witty, with a deep knowledge of the New York and Hollywood scene.

David Evanier tells of his hardships in life with brutal honesty. It is wonderful and absorbing to follow his struggles to overcome these hardships and his persistent search for true and loyal love. He finally succeeds in finding it and he learns to love in return with total trust. His involvement with radical and Jewish groups are both funny and filled with pathos. I loved reading the novel and regretted coming to the end of it.
Elaine Evans

David Evanier's characters are portrayed with an unflinching honesty that makes his book completely compelling and hard to put down.