Cut to the Disappointing Sex

Tim Tomlinson's This is Not Happening to You is a collection of short stories populated by New York-bred men who love tits. Though it might be more accurate to say men who love "beautiful and readily available tits") a la the 80s porn of yore. "Their firmth, if you like … what one hopes for, dreams of, desires, but rarely ever encounters." We see these men as aging Vietnam vets in a blue-collar whodunit mystery, we see them as erudite writers and artists, we even see them as young boys, only just introduced to a world that will soon overtake them.

From the opening story where Rosie, an overweight middle-school boy, pulls out his "little eraser of a penis" in front of a group of young girls, we're given a glimpse into a New York that stretches back to childhood, jumps into the age of Starbucks and Netflix, and dances and skips around a brand of nostalgia that may have never existed, but is nonetheless recognizable. In another story, a teenager working at a travel agency on the Upper West Side that caters to a vast array of Kennedys gets the slightest taste of what it's like to live in world where "Flocks of Kennedy boys dropped down from their aeries and balconies" and "shouted to the chic, lithe women who'd pass by."

At times, one is reminded of the disembodied and floating narrator of Jerzy Kozinski's Steps (1968), a book which reads more as a novel than a collection. But where Kozinski's singular narrator lives outside of cause and effect, Tomlinson's characters are mired in the time and structure of the novel. While we read the book as a loosely-linked collection, this is still a world densely connected, where "Slow traffic idles by as if it's arriving from the 1950s. You have arrived from the late 1960s by way of the Reagan 80s."

In an early story, a slightly self-reluctant womanizer voices his anger and frustration at seeing women talking on the phone. This is just before he takes advantage of an unstable woman. In the midst of this, he gets his head stuck between the slats of a headboard where he's drugged and sodomized, while the woman, high on nitrous cartridges, giggles in a bizarrely innocent fashion with Brian Eno droning in the background. Much later an out-of-work Columbia University graduate bickers with his mother about how she broke his elbow when he was seven because of her "telephone policy" where if he or his brother "bothered [her] on the phone, [they] were both punished." The absurdity of one story is often tapered by the grim reality of another.

In a bar in Shanghai, in the collection's final story, an American discusses the difference between a "wanker" and a "tosser" with an English poet. The two move through Dylan, the Pogues, and Bono, to settle on the notion that "as near as he could figure… a tosser knows he's a tosser, whereas a wanker has no idea he's a wanker." And ultimately this proposition is at the heart of This is Not Happening to You—an existential brand of tension that exists between the reader and the omnipresent cast of narrators. But this is a book as much about writing and the complexities of arrangement as it is about "tits" and tossers and wankers.

A repeating theme of the book might be summed up as "man treats woman like shit—yells at her in a restaurant, berates her in a bar, throws a cup of coffee at a café—then skip a line and cut to the disappointing sex." These are damaged men, equally or more so than the women who apparently fall for them. And thankfully we are spared any version of redemption. Instead we're asked to live with these men. We're given a book that intentionally infuriates. As readers, we're not left with...