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Ideal Marriage

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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.

(...)

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.

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.

This charmer of a debut novel gives us a 16-year-old narrator, Andre Schulman, who is wise and tender beyond his years, but also matter-of-fact and funny-and, like every boy his age, fascinated by sex. In an adolescent fantasy about his dentist's hygienist, he muses that "The possibilities seemed wondrous. Miss Patapov and I might stimulate each other with the air hose and the water squirter, then switch to the electric drill--not with a bur(sic), but a soft toothbrush, feathering it over each other's erogenous zones. We would use heated dental wax, strategically placed, and would trail shreds of dental floss over one another from head to foot..." But unlike most teenage boys, Andre is also captivated by romance, not because it's the key to successful wooing. but because he seems to glimpse that it's as much fun as all the heat and sparks.
Andre isn't exotic, like the teen protagonists in "Life of Pi" or "The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time," but you root for him every bit as much as you do for those less familiar fellows-- and after the book ends, you'll wish you could ring him up and find out how he's doing.

Peter Friedman adopts a pitch-perfect tone for the narrator of his eminently readable novel(la) IDEAL MARRIAGE: it is that of Andre Schulman, a pre-college teenaged boy who lives in the world that once was: New York City in the late 1950's. Life is entirely agreeable: one can get around the city to all manner of pursuits; school is stimulating and enjoyable; lines of communication in the family are pretty much open. And then there is the subject of sex: pervasive, multi-layered, endlessly fascinating, also challenging. Friedman presents a dual aspect of the subject: his hero's ruminations, his fanciful imaginings, his physical activities; the author also quotes (as the narrator reads) from a 1920's manual/treatise: Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique. The juxtaposition of the high-blown prose with Andre's sometimes desperate expressions of when-is-it-ever-going-to-happen lends a special charm and humor to the deftly written book. People come and go, girl friends (potential and otherwise) slip in and out, there are the many enjoyments of almost-fifty-years-ago New York City, there are movies, sports, meals, trips, school activities - all giving diversity and perspective to Andre's Johnny-One-Note life. Set in a time when the music was sweetly enchanting and the lyrics were literate, Ideal Marriage is the same: a pleasure to read.

Although we find him in New York of the 1950s, Andre Schulman, the protagonist of Ideal Marriage, can just as easily be the kind of sensitive postmodern hero of a twenty-first century romantic fantasy. Polite, courteous and self-conscious, he is the kind of guy who knows freesia when he smells it, and for whom no queer eye is necessary. The kind of guy who notices how the blue of a Forex condom container lights up like a stained-glass window when lit from behind. The kind of guy who eats brussel sprouts while waiting to pour sauce on his Thanksgiving turkey. The kind of guy who dreams of an ideal marriage and falls in love with a girl after meeting her once. The kind of guy who the Bridget Joneses and Carrie Bradshaws of our time mourn as extinct. In this funny and meticulous debut novel, Friedman gives us a glimpse into the neuroses of a teenage boy as eager to learn about sex as about the romance and intimacy that comes with it. Andre's voice is earnest and honest, his eye for sensual detail both lovely and wickedly (if unintentionally) funny--in one instance, he removes his blue toothbrush from its place next to a girl's pink one so that their bristles do not touch, so as not to violate her privacy. His sexual awakening provides a language for his growing consciousness and delight in the world: at one point (trying to decide between Christianity and Quakerism), Andre realizes that both he and the CA members he meets are doing the same thing: "imagining a being that was physically absent." These moments as well as the quiet and at times satiric humor throughout make Friedman's book a pleasure to read and an homage to the confusions, hilarity, overanalysis and essential romance that define what growing up is all about.