Ideal Marriage [Hardcover]

Peter Friedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004

16-year-old Andre Schulman discovers the book "Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology And Technique" (1930) by the Dutch gynecologist Th. H. Van de Velde, and, armed with it, sets out in quest of a glorious future—to have "my own ideal marriage someday.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Friedman's slim, puckish first novel chronicles the life of high school student Andre Schulman and his quest to lose his virginity in 1957 New York. Having discovered his parents' copy of H. Van de Velde's 1926 book, Ideal Marriage, 16-year-old Andre takes it as his guide as he navigates the treacherous landscapes of teenage romance and lust. His true love is Jessica, a girl from Massachusetts he meets while she is vacationing with her family in Manhattan. Her return home forces him to practice his seduction techniques on others, including an NYU student and Gloria, a 27-year-old woman he meets during his stint as a pillow salesman at Bloomingdale's. Scenes from Andre's everyday life lend substance to the novelâ€"Andre attends a lefty private school and rebuffs the dogged advances of a student Christian associationâ€"but seldom does Friedman stray from sex. A visit to the dentist inspires erotic musings about the dental hygienist; a school trip to Philadelphia offers an opportunity for fumbling with a classmate in the back of a darkened bus. Friedman's tone is relaxed and humorous, and Andre's first-person narration is intelligent and engagingly self-deprecating ("On rainy days I held only half my umbrella over me, preparing for holding the other half over Jessica"). Gracefully skirting the pitfalls of his well-worn subject matter, Friedman crafts a light, airy novel with charm to spare.
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About the Author

Peter Friedman is a Fulbright scholar, a formerly-practicing attorney and counsel to New York City Mayor Robert Wagner at the New York State Constitutional Convention, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, non-fiction, and humor. His writing has appeared in Harpers, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Review, East Europe, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, and many other publications.

Friedman graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 1958, received his J.D. in 1961 from Harvard Law School, and earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Law from Columbia in 1971 with a thesis on East German law. During his professional career, he has taught writing workshops at The New School in Fiction and Non fiction, written speeches for New York City Mayor Robert Wagner at the New York State Constitutional Convention, and done consulting work on economic development with Hortense Gabel.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579621007
• ISBN-13: 978-1579621001
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,297,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Friedman's Sweet and Funny Novel is a Pure Pleasure, April 18, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ideal Marriage (Hardcover)

In the age of Internet porn, "Girls Gone Wild" videos and Paris Hilton's home movies, it's safe to say that American popular culture has managed to strip the last shred of romance out of sex. Somewhere in our national neurotic jumble of puritanical guilt and secret titillation we lost touch with whatever it is that makes lovemaking something other than an X-rated version of seven minutes of high-impact aerobics. And that's exactly why Peter Friedman's sweet and funny IDEAL MARRIAGE is such a pure pleasure.

Set in New York City in 1957, IDEAL MARRIAGE follows a year in the life of Andre Schulman, a sixteen-year-old boy eager to complete his passage into manhood. Like any sixteen-year-old of any era, Andre thinks about sex. But he is the diametric opposite of Philip Roth's Portnoy. Rather than an obsession with the physical act, Andre exhibits a dedication to a kind of holistic notion of romantic love that includes sex, rather than being dominated by it. It's an attitude that is less naïve than it is sweetly, idealistically practical. Andre wants to get married some day and enjoy a lifetime of romance and sex with a woman with whom he is deeply, passionately in love. Andre is no Boy Scout, and his ambitions aren't driven by any phony sense of morality. He simply has a particular goal in mind.

In his effort to achieve this goal, Andre studies a book he finds hidden "behind four volumes of the Yearbook of Agriculture" on his parent's bookshelf: IDEAL MARRIAGE: Its Physiology and Technique. As it happens, this is a real book, written in 1926 by Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde. (Go ahead, look it up, ISBN: 0313224420.) The book provides Andre with frank and surprisingly poetic advice on the emotional and physical expression of love. Short passages from the book appear at the beginning of each chapter of Andre's first-person narrative.

Through the narrative Andre reveals himself to be a smart, sensitive, thoughtful and surprisingly mature young man. His flights of neurotic imagination are as likely to find him daydreaming about a romantic encounter with a girl as they are having him ruminating over the possibility of a surprise Russian nuclear attack. He analyzes everything. Even the most miniscule details of daily life attract his slightly off-kilter scrutiny. His inner dialogue, as well as his conversations with friends and family, kept me in a constant grin, periodically interrupted by out-loud laughter.

There isn't a wasted word in this compact confection of a novel. Author Peter Friedman delivers a fine and funny homage to romance, to youth and to the subtle complexities of love in all of its manifestations. Yet, he addresses his subject matter in a manner that won't rot your teeth or leave you worrying about your carb intake. IDEAL MARRIAGE is a guilt-free dessert of a book, a refreshing tonic to an age that accepts getting flashed by a drunken coed during spring break as a romantic encounter. Peter Friedman's IDEAL MARRIAGE reminds us that there's something better. Indulge.

(...)

5.0 out of 5 stars SEX BY THE BOOK, March 27, 2005

By 

Sally A. Johnson (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ideal Marriage (Hardcover)

Can a well-brought-up 16 year old boy from New York City learn enough about sex by studying techniques he finds in a 1920's sex manual to become a gigolo in Rome for a summer or two? Techniques (he points out) that he will eventually employ in achieving an ideal marriage? Andre Schulman, the teenage narrator of Peter Friedman's comic novel IDEAL MARRIAGE, is determined to find out in this witty and often outrageous gem of a coming-of-age novel. The year is 1957 and the book Andre has discovered, hidden in his parents bookcase behind four volumes of the Yearbook of Agriculture, is Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, written in 1926 by a Dutch gynecologist, Th. H. Van de Velde.

Andre's adventures begin with an unsatisfying date with classmate Eleanor. After briefly contemplating sleeping with Ronda, the alcoholic wife of a friend of his parents, he meets the beautiful Jessica on a Circle Line cruise around Manhattan. She is smart, romantic and, it seems to Andre, is ideally suited to become his future wife. He spends Thanksgiving at her parents' home in Massachusetts and they maintain a long-distance courtship via love letters, culminating in a final letter from Jessica announcing her return to her previous boy friend.

Crushed, Andre pulls himself together sufficiently to date dumpy Doris, an NYU sophomore whose chief attraction is that she has an apartment of her own. Then over spring vacation of his last year in high school Andre lands the perfect job, a sales position in Bloomingdale's pillow department (where better to meet women with beds on their minds?) Here he meets Gloria, 10 years his senior, with whom he finally manages to lose his virginity.

Life for Andre is not all a bed of ...well, beds and bedding. Along the way he faces various challenges that can be harrowing to teenagers: varsity basketball; ballroom dancing lessons; family relationships; dental work; girls on school field trips; college plans; and worrying whether a hydrogen bomb dropped on Wall Street would affect him at East 75th Street (it's the 1950's, remember?). Through it all the author entertains us with Andre's off-beat narrative full of quirky charm.

I loved this book, not just because it is funny and sexy, but because it is actually so innocent.

5.0 out of 5 stars A breath of fresh air, February 1, 2005

By 

Jen Singer "Author, You're a Good Mom (and Yo... (Kinnelon, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ideal Marriage (Hardcover)

Peter Friedman's "Ideal Marriage" has the rare combination of humor, love, sex and romance that you just don't find in today's "reality" TV era when watching people eat bugs is considered entertainment.

It's very enjoyable -- even for this mother of two boys who worries that her sons might someday pick up women in the pillow department at Bloomies, just like the book's main character.