The Men Can't Be Saved

June 1, 2023
A tragicomic bildungsroman for the young, career-driven city set. Poet Purkert's debut novel brings quite a few ideas to the table--toxic masculinity, the black hole at the center of capitalism, even the wisdom of the Talmud--but it's the flash and sizzle of his wit that really deliver this bleak cautionary tale. Twenty-something Seth Taranoff is many things, and also not much. Narcissistic, unreliable, addicted to pills, a not-long-ago successful New York junior copywriter (perhaps, he once thought, a wunderkind?) now laid off and working in a coffee shop, he manages to fail in each and every department of his life, systematically, spectacularly, with remarkable self-delusion. After a terrible stretch of long, vacant months, outside the reach of romantic love from the two women in his life--cutthroat copywriter Josie and artistic fellow barista Ramya--stuck in an existential as well as a pharmaceutically induced brain fog, Seth winds up broke, homeless, and despondent in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And, as if that weren't enough, he realizes that his former co-worker Robert "Moon" McCloone, a man-on-top with the heart of a frat boy, has become his terrible shadow, at times persecutor, for reasons he simply can't fathom. Is Moon the symbol of what Seth could have been in advertising if only he had fully dispensed with his conscience? Could he mean more to Seth than Seth realizes, or less? Staring into his particular abyss, Seth finally understands why he loved studying deconstruction theory in college: It's easier to pull things apart than to put them together, easier to be faithless and allow yourself to be carried by the tide, to waste your life instead of believing in it. Seth begins to walk a path of suffering that may in time lead him to the green pastures and still waters of self-acceptance. Or something like. For a man still so young, he's so old. Ironic, plangent, gritty, and, ultimately, spiritual.

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June 26, 2023
Poet Purkert (For the Love of Endings) makes his fiction debut with a smart satire centered on a New York City copywriter turned religious seeker. Seth Taranoff works for an ad agency, RazorBeat, where he wins an award for a viral campaign advertising underwear designed for men with incontinence (“Everyday Briefs for the Everyday Hero,” went the tagline). But after RazorBeat downsizes, Seth is laid off. He then pursues freelance work, takes a barista job at a coffee shop called Sötma, and makes various half-hearted attempts at meaningful relationships. After traveling to Allentown, Pa., to track down a woman he’s interested in from the Sötma staff, he meets a rabbi and is welcomed into a Chabad house. Seth’s time with the rabbi’s family and their religious sect offers opportunities to explore his Jewish identity, but it’s also a place for free meals, and Purkert keeps readers guessing as to whether Seth is capable of sincerity. Like its protagonist, Purkert’s freewheeling narrative sometimes feels unsteady in its direction, but the finely wrought prose and spot-on descriptions are undeniable: visiting a strip club with an odious former colleague, Seth notices how during a break between sets, “the mostly male audience twitched like a smattering of crabs at low tide.” This is great fun. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co.