KEY POINTS:
Harry Rent is straight from a Woody Allen movie. He is saggy yet randy; idealistic yet compromised, thin but with "an unfortunate marsupial pouch". He is also loquaciously, inexorably self-analytical and self-focused.
His suit hangs limply. He fiddles with the space left by his wedding ring, which he thinks he has left in a call-girl's room. He lives in a multimillion-dollar home on a beautiful Bel Air hillside, but "can't be said to have taste, so much as a clot of loosely held leanings".
He defines himself by negatives: "I'm not a golfer, I'm not a Dadaist ..." He has just lost his wife to plastic surgery - terminally. He lusts after a waitress at the local, 1950s-themed cafe who is writing a master's thesis on Patriarchal Modes in Contemporary Fiction.
So it is endlessly inventive, with an author who is endlessly present. There's a cram of darkly hilarious scenes: the restaurant couple with a funeral urn; Harry's tie getting covered with jam and then caught in the coffin at his wife's funeral.
Just about everyone is a caricature. Cleverness starts to conceal content; the story is at its best when deepened by moments of blank terror and desolation. Criss-crossing between then and now, our protagonist becomes involved with a second, ingrown toenail-afflicted waitress.
A battered grey Impala tails him. So do two unattractive cops. He knocks out a tattooed boyfriend, confronts a sulky young thug in jail, meets a better man for his wife at his own wedding.
As the plot ricochets towards an agonised, incomplete reconciliation, Harry never fully recovers from the loss of someone beautiful and mostly loving, but he does save an overweight, under-privileged life, and realises that others are even more lost than he is.
By the end, there is precarious hope for a man whose purpose seems to be to provide that which needs to be cleaned up.
Black and cute and just a few degrees too smart to be completely successful.
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
Harry, Revised
By Mark Sarvas (Text $37)
