Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2011
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. Now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up, and she's putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing to do: Frank has to go.
But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been in heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even conventional sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know and yet no longer what you want?
"Jacobson, who won the Man Booker for The Finkler Question, writes like a Jewish Evelyn Waugh. Laugh-out-loud observations abound, but the grating Frank may test readers' patience as he meanders through his sexually disordered life." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a false note." - Kirkus Reviews
"First published in England in 1998, this novel, with its abundance of crude sex terms, offers a raw view of the sexes and the differences between them and lacks the gentle humor of Jacobson's Man Booker Prize-winner, The Finkler Question (2010)." - Booklist
"[T]his sometimes witty and often raunchy novel will most likely appeal to fairly sophisticated male readers familiar with British life." - Library Journal
"Brilliant and funny… No More Mr. Nice Guy shows invention on every page, every paragraph. Jacobson is unique." - Evening Standard (UK)
"A very funny, very intelligent novel… How many of [Jacobson's] contemporaries have described the male condition with such wry, unsparing honesty?" - Sunday Telegraph (UK)
This information about No More Mr. Nice Guy was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jenny Jacobson
An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and, most recently, the highly acclaimed The Act of Love. Howard Jacobson lives in London.
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