Customer Reviews

Ladies' Man

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is Richard Price's third novel. It's so incredibly funny! You will laugh, and laugh... It's great to read a book where someone gets it right about what it's like to be man in this day and age.

He's also written "The Wanderers", "Bloodbrothers" and "Clockers." He's even admitted in interviews that this is his favorite book (It's also his shortest).

I would put Richard Price in the same league as Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn) Very New York, very insightful and loves to tell good stories. The truth is I'm amazed this book was never made into a film.

Price has since gone on to become one of Hollywood's most gifted (and highest paid) screenwriters. His scripts include: "The Color of Money", "Sea of Love", "Ransom", "Mad Dog and Glory", and many others...

You gotta read it to believe it. I've loaned my copy to several friends and they've told me that sometimes they were kissing the pages--it was that brilliant. The "Swapline" scene is priceless! So is "Kenny makes a move." The author takes you through, day-by-day, the life of a regular guy in Manhattan. Kenny Becker loses his job, his girlfriend, and by the end .... discovers himself and a new meaning of life.

Here's a clip from the book - page 5 - about his high maintenance (difficult) girlfriend:

"...and she was human and I loved her. She needed me. I knew she needed me. And I wasn't stupid or shallow. I knew all about sexism, and productive relationships and growth, but I'm talking about love. I'm talking about irrational, illogical passion. And you can go to all the forums on meaningful concepts, you can have all the shared interests you want, but the bottom line with what I'm talking about here was how her arms felt wrapped around my neck when she was coming, how she looked at me when I made her laugh. And how I knew she needed me, how in my heart she needed me. The rest was all good and well, but it wasn't from the gut and it wasn't love."

Anyone who doesn't like this book just doesn't get it. It's so real. And it's laced with so much humor. Real zingers. He puts his soul on the page--and you feel his life flow through you.

Enjoy!

Kenny Becker, the protagonist of Richard Price's "Ladies' Man," will appeal to some readers and exasperate others. He had both effects on me, simultaneously.
As the novel traces one grueling week in this 30-year-old New Yorker's life, it becomes clear what his problem is: He seems to have a near-pathological aversion to any kind of commitment. His love life is a series of depressing affairs that invariably end badly; he's lost touch with his old school friends; his job is a bad joke; he practically has to have a gun to his head just to call his parents. This book contains one of the most heartbreaking paragraphs I've ever read: After reminiscing fondly about the bonding he did with his fraternity brothers back in college, Kenny concludes, "Of course, after three months I lost interest and dropped out of the fraternity, but that's just me, Cut-and-Run Becker."
We watch through Kenny's eyes as one life-changing event after another hits him during this week. As he gives voice to his restlessness, loneliness and longing, one thing keeps the story from becoming too whiny or self-involved: Price's nearly anthropological familiarity with the details of modern urban loneliness. It's all here -- the excruciating singles-bar scene, the daydreams about other paths one might take, even the feeling that when you come home at night the newspaper on the doormat is mocking your lack of plans for the evening.
One thing is for sure: If you have healthy, sustaining relationships with other people, you'll never take them for granted again after reading "Ladies' Man."

I have read almost all of Richard Price's books, and I really feel this one is his weakest; poor characterization and plot. Highly recommend the rest, especially Freedomland and Samaritan!!

This book had me from page 1. The description about aborigines waiting for a coke bottle from the sky that they had witnessed years ago to waiting for a freak lay that happened 6 months ago is entirely too real. First i laughed, then i almost cried. Pathetic? Yes, but arent't we all. And the scene meeting old high school freinds, way too spooky. I swear i was reading my autobiograpy. All in all though, very funny, very sad, and very honest. A week from hell. We've all been there.

I have read this book 4 times and let me tell you it is by far the best book I have ever read. For one it is very well written, I have never had such visualization of people or characters in any book. I can describe Jackie Di Paris as if he was a real person. Putting "Friend of Whores" in capital letters was awesome, I still die laughing every time I read that.
Kenny the riffer is your average guy who I beleive accurately thinks like most men. That damn Candy, everyone knows a Candy, a guy who you beleive for whatever reason is doing better than you and you measure yourself against and can't stand him for that. I use quotes from this book all the time and people just look at me like what the hell. Like the other day in a department store I walked up to a clerk and said "I know Leonard Nimoy." When my wife states her opinion I just say "ahh dint as yu." I use the word riff a lot now, when I'm at work people just call me the riffer. Sometimes I walk around all day like "back to Bataan." I even named one of my daughters La Donna.

Great book you will not be disappointed. The people who are just "don't get it" and probably are the Candy's of the world.

I'm reading this book for the 3rd time in a row. Each time it gets better.

As opposed to other Richard Price books, where the reader and writer have to juggle about 25 characters at once, this book focuses on just one guy and what he goes through during the week he breaks up with his girlfriend. You really get inside this guy's head. He's funny, smart, a nitwit, and full of himself.

The book is a series of actions (e.g., the protagonist comes home and finds his girlfriend using a vibrator) and reactions (he flips out). He has sad sex with a hooker and then thinks about taking her out to dinner. His best friend from high school admits to homosexuality, and the main character struggles to maintain a straight face.

I envy Price for writing this book.

Although I'm a single woman in her 30s, I really related to this book about a guy who's just turned 30 and broken up with his girlfriend. I loved the raw realistic way Richard Price captured what it's like to be single and live in a big city (like him, I also lived in NYC when I turned 30). Being a heterosexual female, I never visited massage parlors or peep shows like this guy did, but the reason I found this book so refreshing was that I didn't find it preachy or self-pitying like so many other singles books. It just tells it like it is. I wouldn't be surprised if the creators of Sex and the City (which I also love) were inspired by this book.

After reading Price's newer novels based on crime and detective work, Ladies Man comes as a decidedly junior effort when comparing writing styles. The first half of the book was a bore sprinkled with a depressing story line. The second half marks a shift to a greater introspection into the character's lives, albiet still depressing. The ending is very abrupt. Quite possibly his worst novel.

Okay, aside from reading like a "You know, this could be Holden Caulfield at 29" script, the first 200 or so pages are pretty good. Readable, anyway. But the last bits just totally suck. no ending in sight, and in a way that doesn't necessarily seem intentional. i actually examined my copies spine to see if maybe the last chapter had been torn out or something. Skip this, skip this one big time.

This is, in my opinion, Price's worst book. Price is an amazing writer -- "Freedomland" is one of my favorite books -- but this isn't him at his best. "The Wanderers" was his childhood and it had a clear-sighted verisimilitude. "Ladies' Man" reveals that the author knows his town (New York) like no one else, but reading it today it becomes mind-numbingly dated and the ending, as noted, shoots off the charts. Anyone who doesn't want to read about the "hideous, dirty, sick" ways homosexuals hung out back in the `70s will want to skip this book, too. The ending winds up in an underground gay club and Price really lays it on thick with people locked tightly into a room and groping freely. The homophobia and mixed messages here speaks, I guess, more so of the author than of his character.

I would only read this if you're a fan of Price and want to see how he rose from the lean-meat prose of "Wanderers" and ascended to the literary heaven of "Freedomland." Otherwise, I think you'll be hugely disappointed. Pick up "Land" or "Clockers" instead.

This is a minor misstep in the career of a monumentally talented man.