Flak Magazine: Cad, 2.14.03

For all of its purported immorality, the worst sin in "Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor," a new memoir by Rick Marin, gets committed not in the text but on the cover, where it identifies Steve Martin as "author of 'Shopgirl.'" Fight the urge to judge this book by its facade from the get-go, but it won't be long before you succumb. If you can't believe that, in the era of AIDS, a writer refers to his healthy self as a toxic bachelor — without irony — you won't be happy with "Cad." Congratulations. You still have a stylistic conscience, if not a moral one.

Marin's book tells the story of his late 20s and early 30s, that age in a man's life when immaturity pretends to maturity via post-collegiate wariness. It begins with our hero, a native of Toronto, transplanted to New York, where he has just finished Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Astute readers should already be reaching for the TV remote at this point. If you need a better example of why editors don't want to hire j-school grads, Cad's hackneyed writing is a good example. So is this nugget: "There are two kinds of women: the ones who get offended by the word chick and the ones who don't." Of course! How had we not known?

Initially, Marin's intentions are honorable, and he finds employment at Harper's. The brief descriptions of life at the magazine are actually quite amusing. Skewering an unnamed editor who dresses and sounds suspiciously like Lewis Lapham, Marin discovers his editor's erudition is a fraud culled from the pages of quotation books lining his office:

As an avid subscriber, I'd always marveled at this legendary Man of Letters' ability to begin each month's column with obscure aphorisms from Montaigne or Thomas De Quincey. So when I'd overhear him bellowing at his secretary, I expected it to be something along the lines of, "Where the hell's my copy of Seneca's Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium!" But usually it was more like, "Don't pay that American Express bill! I think we've got a few more days."

Terry Teachout has a cameo, and so does Fareed Zakaria, whom Marin pegs, accurately, as affecting "the genius-on-deck gravitas of a guy who knew he was going to edit Foreign Affairs someday."

Soon enough, the author begins a tryst with co-worker Elisabeth, of the "porcelain-doll skin" and black eyes and other clichés. Impressed by her Wall Street Journal op-ed byline and the way she wears her watch over the sleeve of her sweater — neither of which, on reflection, strike this reviewer as particularly good omens — Marin falls hard. So hard, in fact, that, three months on and running out of legal residency in the United States, the two get married. Almost immediately, Marin makes an equally poor decision, taking a job at the Washington Times. So much for respectability.

The marriage gradually disintegrates over three years that were probably a lot more interesting than Marin describes — might they have provided material for a novel more engaging than this memoir? After moving back to New York, the author dispatches his former lover with the following brick: "I let her make her own way to the Metroliner the next morning." Only a person pretending to be from New York would actually refer to the train by, essentially, its brand name. The branding impulse runs riot all over Marin's book. This isn't surprising, especially for a journalist whose career culminated in assignments about fashion and celebrity for the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times. It's the kind of prose palatable for celebrity profiles — "Ms. Dunst poked her risotto with her fork and furrowed her brow at the Spago crowd, her free hand playing with the strap of her Gucci dress" — but it sounds ridiculous, and gets painful, spread out over 284 pages.

The bulk of the book is a chronicle of Marin's single life in New York, a revolving door of various women whom he desperately pretends to disrespect. We meet Kay (addicted medical student) and Kay 2 (Jewish American princess) and Tiina (Finnish restauranteuse) and Tabitha (years his junior), all of whom the author caricatures in his effort to come off as a real playboy. Instead of thinking little of his conquests, Marin does exactly what a real cad wouldn't: he feels remorse. The revelation, rather than ingratiate us to him, just paints him as more and more of a loser. Secret moralists don't make the best cads.

They don't make the best memoirists, either.

Pretension runs rampant: "Cad" wants to be transgressive when it's completely tame. The Globe and Mail has reported the unfortunate news that Marin is working on a screenplay. He'd be wise to sell the rights to MTV, for whom he actually works at one point in the book. The book is music-television fare: the shock of sexual immorality ends up stifled in the old girl-meets-boy business. Our tour through Marin's bad-boy years serves only as a bridge to — surprise! — his eventual marital bliss. All of those lacerating asides and self-doubt, all of those petty judgements and obsessive tics, they're all, in a word, bullshit. Never has so much irony served so much sincerity to create such a waste of time.

There are funny moments in "Cad," but they are too few to sustain the book's momentum, and, soon enough, we're gratified to hear more about Marin's developing career than his sexual dalliances. Indeed, the funny thing about "Cad" is that, while it fails to make any insights glimpse about the male psyche, it does succeed in revealing a more mundane truth: how a freelance writer can make it in Gotham. The passages about Marin's parents and his Canadian home are, in true form, heartfelt and insightful. Charitable readers may guess he wishes he had written a book about them instead of himself. Those less charitable will wish it for themselves.

— Joshua Adams (joshua at uchicago dot edu)