A literary novel that behaves and satisfies the way a literary novel should. Millard Kaufman’s Bowl Of Cherries, McSweeney’s Rectangulars, $22.00, is such a book. In a media obsessed world only those in the deepest darkest jungles, or perhaps the Assos of Coproliabad, the background inhabitants of this dark-delicious yet light and fluffy drama, have not been over-exposed to the high-calorie low-brain-cell fest of Hollywood spillwater. Mr. Kaufman, a veteran of that war-torn land, with gold statuette nominations to prove it, is no exception. Rife with its requisite share of Hollywood sexual pessimism, Bowl Of Cheeries’ hero/anti-hero Judd Breslau, held captive in the bowels of Coproliabad’s shit encrusted prison, is slated for a horrifying heathen death. Shit encrusted key because all of Assama’s, a nation which appears on maps in the shape of a chicken, deep within the confines of Iraq, structures, (buildings, monuments, sculptures) are made from shit. Human shit in a chicken shaped nation. Human shit in a chicken shaped nation rumored to once have been Eden. Judd Breslau a failed Yale wunderkind at fourteen can’t be more than that when finally imprisoned and imprisoned for what? Pussy. Specifically Valerie Chatterton’s pussy. Pussy Valerie Chatterton gives away with little or no impunity to almost everyone who asks, and everyone asks, even Judd, who gets a taste, and from that single taste becomes addicted and in the end gets not just Valerie’s pussy but Valerie as well but not before being jailed in a shit prison because of it. God bless the happy ending may she forever wave. Rich thick plots of post apocalyptic predestination, the secret of the pyramids being built with sound and American government conspiracy to pilfer the secret of shit bricks from the Assos abound. 

Like a large dog with its head thrust from the window of a fast car the reader is whipped in the face with expertly written prose as the book leaps back and forth between how Judd Breslau will die and why. Judd Breslau, at fourteen, is a dud at most everything but he lives and would die for pussy but as Daphne Titsworth, ex-superstar porn queen, visiting Judd in his shit cell proclaims, “Even when a person goes legit, gets really married, or zeroes in on a significant other, it still sucks.” Which makes one wonder if Valerie Chatterton’s pussy, Valerie Chatterton immortalized by Assama’s ruling prince in a larger than life-size shit sculpture outside Coproliabad’s shit prison, is worth all the trouble Judd Breslau goes through to get it. In the end Judd does get it, not just Valerie Chatterton’s pussy but the big IT as well leaving the reader, dog face happily whipped, salivating for ninety-year-old Mr. Kaufman’s, next eminently readable literary effort.