“Being in love is the least efficient mode of existence, like going through life with a piano on your back.” — Bar Maid
Debut novel by DANIEL ROBERTS
It’s September 1987. Charlie Green is an eighteen-year-old romantic and aspiring alcoholic, whose great wish is to fall in love with a light-eyed girl on his first day of college and never look back. Charlie believes in the magic of bars and girls. He believes he can use these talismans to finally feel at home, an assurance his dim and privileged childhood did not provide. At the Sansom Street Oyster House, he meets Paula Henderson, a beautiful and deceptively soulful waitress who is the most overqualified bar maid in all the city — and perhaps the most alluring.
But there are obstacles in the Philly night between Charlie and his full heart. Drunks, louts, boyfriends—heroes too. And in Paula’s eyes, Charlie becomes one. When she takes him home to New Hope, PA, to meet her very Catholic mother, the young couple must contend with the consequences of their pure love.
In this darkly comedic coming-of-age novel, Charlie Green needs to grow up fast. At stake is his soul.
Reviews
“An archly comic love story with notes of farce and fable . . . Roberts’s old school, slightly surreal humor has a dash or Barthelme or Perelman.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Daniel Roberts’s rowdy and tender coming-of-age romp is proof positive that, even in the Ivy League, the best education is always found off-campus.”
— Dennis O’Neill, screenwriter and author of The River Wild
“A snazzy, robust, sometimes hilarious novel about a kid ‘stuck in the 80s, figuring stuff out.””
— Nick Lyons, author of Fire in the Straw