Lunatics

December 12, 2011
Humorists Barry (Tricky Business) and Zweibel (The Other Shulman) team up to spin the madcap adventure of Philip Horkman and Jeffrey A. Peckerman, who meet on the soccer pitch of a Fort Lee, N.J., girls’ 10-and-under league championship game, where Horkman calls Peckerman’s daughter offside. Alternating chapters of mutual loathing between Horkman, a coarse, “forensic plumber,” and Peckerman, the progressive owner of a pet store called the Wine Shop, chronicle a fight that escalates by accident and miscalculation to encompass high seas piracy and revolution. As unwitting as the characters in Woody Allen’s Without Feathers—or, better yet, as inept as Bananas’ Fielding Mellish—Horkman and Peckerman stumble over themselves trying to escape police, nudists, a lemur named Buddy, a tank in Tiananmen Square, fruit-wielding Somalis, Yemeni terrorists, Chuck E. Cheese, and Donald Trump. Energetic, scatological, and profoundly silly. Agents: (for Barry) Amy Berkower, Writers House; (for Zweibel) Laura Nolan, Paradigm.

December 1, 2011
A novel for those who love one-liners, outrageous characters and loopy plots. Jeffrey Peckerman has a beef—plenty of them, in fact, but his initial one involves what he views as an unfair offsides call at his 11-year-old daughter's soccer game. The ref who makes the questionable call is Philip Horkman, owner of a pet store incongruously called The Wine Shop (because his in-laws, the Wines, funded his business venture). And thus begins one of the strangest buddy novels of this or any century. The hapless characters begin a hate-hate relationship that literally takes them around the globe, starting with an escaped lemur, an insulin pump and the misapprehension that Peckerman and Horkman are members of al-Qaeda trying to blow up the George Washington Bridge. To escape, they make their way onto a cruise ship about to leave New York harbor, only to discover that it's clothing optional. Horkman starts to fall in love with a nun (after all, she's not wearing her habit) and plunges overboard to save her when she's swept away in a storm. From here events get even goofier, as the two opponents land in Cuba (and co-lead a revolution), then go to Mozambique (and are captured by pirates), thence to Yemen (where they are rescued by the Mossad), afterwards to Beijing (and lead a protest in Tiananmen Square), and finally to California, where they meet Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention and where Horkman, despite being a Democrat, is nominated for president. (Later, Peckerman becomes the Democratic nominee, but his obscenity-laced speeches are the despair of his handlers.) Throughout their romp around the world they're constantly at each other's throats, either literally or metaphorically, Horkman's prissiness playing off of Peckerman's crude cynicism. An antidote, if one is needed, to gritty urban realism.

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December 15, 2011
How do two humorists effectively collaborate on a novel? By each writing the narrative for his character, alternating the perspectives in an insane adventure. Phillip Horkman is a by-the-rules kind of guy, a pet-store owner and soccer referee. Jeffrey Peckerman is a profane forensic plumber who thinks the world is populated with jerks, with the exception of himself. The New Jersey suburban dads collide when Horkman disqualifies what would have been a game-winning score made by Peckerman's daughter. The two embark on escalating violence that takes them on a wild car chase that gets viewed as a possible terrorist threat by the police. On the run, they travel by cruise ship, submarine, helicopter, freighter, and airplane to Cuba, Somalia, China, and the Middle East, wreaking havoc and inadvertently checking off a lot of items on the U.S. geopolitical to-do list along the way. Barry, humor columnist for the Miami Herald, and Zweibel, award-winning comedy writer originally with Saturday Night Live, are more than effective in this collaboration, although the gag of two lunatics on the run sometimes wears a bit thin. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Pulitzer Prizewinning humorist Barry and Emmy, Thurber, and Tony Award winner Zweibel bring plenty of star power to a comic novel that will be supported by a national print and electronic advertising campaign.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)