Young Men on Fire
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
As the great American boom ends, four men switch on their "bunny-hunting engines" and embark on a wild tour of Manhattan's nightlife. Dot-com may have fallen, but money is still washing around New York. Jim Troxler arrives in the city to meet his younger brother, Martin, a hip dot-commentator. Little does he know that Martin has planned a night out. Joining the brothers will be Big Guy, a weirdly magnetic e-content salesman, and C.C. Baxter, founder of a "formerly huge" online advertising agency.
On the trawl from one bar to another, Jim watches Martin and his pals boozing, ingesting drugs, dancing badly, and jostling for hipness. Soon the men have picked up no fewer than five women -- two marketing chicks who speedload their cigarettes, two husband hunters, and the young, naive, and fabulous Zebra Hat Girl. Then, palming cash and talking trash, the group ends up on an enormous party boat circling Manhattan. The boat is filled with hundreds of young, sexed-up New Yorkers -- all ecstatically unaware that in four days the World Trade Center will be destroyed and their never-ending party will be over. But before then -- by the next morning -- Jim Troxler will be changed forever.
Howard Hunt's Young Men on Fire is a brilliant portrait of the desires and deceptions that fueled the great American boom. At once laugh-out-loud funny and shrewdly perceptive, it introduces an exciting new voice in contemporary writing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hunt updates the jaded, full-throttle party attitude that made Bright Lights, Big Citysuch a shocker, offering an analogous take on the dot-com boom in a book long on hip commentary, elaborate pick-up scenes and crisp character writing, but noticeably short on plot. The story begins when Dr. Jim Troxler, a surgeon who has lived in Australia for five years, returns to New York to meet up with his brother, Martin, a successful writer of popular social criticism. Together, they plan to drive to Florida to see their father, who has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But instead Martin drags Jim on a club-going odyssey, along with C.C. Baxter, the founder of a failing online ad agency, and the hysterical Big Guy, a Web content salesman who assumes a different personality with each successive pick-up effort. The male bonding sequences get old in a hurry, but Hunt supplements the "bunny hunting" expedition with commentary from would-be paramours, a group of young women who offer a decidedly different take on the evening hustle. Hunt has his nightlife routine down pat, from the cultural analysis to the cocaine interludes. The novel shifts gears at the end, though, turning from the ongoing brother vs. brother battle that dominates the party scenes to Jim's flirtation with a comely drummer. Their surprisingly touching and sensitive romantic banter shows plenty of promise, but it comes too late to work as a full-blown subplot. While the cultural commentary has its share of appeal, the heartfelt effectiveness of the romantic writing exposes the facile, trendy approach in the earlier chapters, leaving readers to wonder what might have been if the author had developed a richer story line earlier in the book.
