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In the age of Internet porn, "Girls Gone Wild" videos and Paris Hilton's home movies, it's safe to say that American popular culture has managed to strip the last shred of romance out of sex. Somewhere in our national neurotic jumble of puritanical guilt and secret titillation we lost touch with whatever it is that makes lovemaking something other than an X-rated version of seven minutes of high-impact aerobics. And that's exactly why Peter Friedman's sweet and funny IDEAL MARRIAGE is such a pure pleasure.
Set in New York City in 1957, IDEAL MARRIAGE follows a year in the life of Andre Schulman, a sixteen-year-old boy eager to complete his passage into manhood. Like any sixteen-year-old of any era, Andre thinks about sex. But he is the diametric opposite of Philip Roth's Portnoy. Rather than an obsession with the physical act, Andre exhibits a dedication to a kind of holistic notion of romantic love that includes sex, rather than being dominated by it. It's an attitude that is less naïve than it is sweetly, idealistically practical. Andre wants to get married some day and enjoy a lifetime of romance and sex with a woman with whom he is deeply, passionately in love. Andre is no Boy Scout, and his ambitions aren't driven by any phony sense of morality. He simply has a particular goal in mind.
In his effort to achieve this goal, Andre studies a book he finds hidden "behind four volumes of the Yearbook of Agriculture" on his parent's bookshelf: IDEAL MARRIAGE: Its Physiology and Technique. As it happens, this is a real book, written in 1926 by Dutch gynecologist Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde. (Go ahead, look it up, ISBN: 0313224420.) The book provides Andre with frank and surprisingly poetic advice on the emotional and physical expression of love. Short passages from the book appear at the beginning of each chapter of Andre's first-person narrative.
Through the narrative Andre reveals himself to be a smart, sensitive, thoughtful and surprisingly mature young man. His flights of neurotic imagination are as likely to find him daydreaming about a romantic encounter with a girl as they are having him ruminating over the possibility of a surprise Russian nuclear attack. He analyzes everything. Even the most miniscule details of daily life attract his slightly off-kilter scrutiny. His inner dialogue, as well as his conversations with friends and family, kept me in a constant grin, periodically interrupted by out-loud laughter.
There isn't a wasted word in this compact confection of a novel. Author Peter Friedman delivers a fine and funny homage to romance, to youth and to the subtle complexities of love in all of its manifestations. Yet, he addresses his subject matter in a manner that won't rot your teeth or leave you worrying about your carb intake. IDEAL MARRIAGE is a guilt-free dessert of a book, a refreshing tonic to an age that accepts getting flashed by a drunken coed during spring break as a romantic encounter. Peter Friedman's IDEAL MARRIAGE reminds us that there's something better. Indulge.
--- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart
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