Only the Good Parts is written following the rather old-fashioned technique of presenting letters between the characters. What modernizes this rather formal, dispassionate and emotionally distancing gimmick is that Curzon's characters are sending each other faxes and emails and notes slipped under doors. There is an immediacy to the communications which makes them surprisingly compelling. . . . It's a good book. Interesting. Provocative. For all sorts of reasons. -- Toby Johnson, White Crane Journal, Fall, 1998
I enjoyed the book. One of the best contemporary uses of a centuries-old form. Few attempts at fiction in the form of letters work so well. Some novelists use the related form of writing whole chapters from the point of view of one character only, and yet they don't make the individuals distinct. In Only the Good Parts, the voice (and personality) of each character is sharp and clear. -- Jerry Rosco, author of forthcoming biography of Glenway Wescott
I liked Only The Good Parts very much. It has ideas, style, and bite. Once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. So different from the typical, recent gay fiction I've had to trudge through for my gay men's reading group -- inept, maudlin stuff, which nevertheless finds major publishers, gets reviewed all over, and goes into paperback editions after the hardbound. -- John Lauritsen, author of The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, and A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
A gay college professor named Marc Brandt arranges to have a child with a lesbian couple, anonymously. What follows are both clever and cruel deceptions, the paternal vs. the maternal, the very latest of the modern, and the oldest of the human.
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