(pages 48-71)

There’s a description of a sixteen-year-old pop star who is totally not Britney Spears, what gave you that idea?  She denies being a sex object, and “you” laugh, because she wears short skirts and therefore only exists to titillate middle-aged men.  Stands to reason.

“You” reflect on “your” midlife crisis, and how bungee-jumping didn’t make you feel alive but sleeping with an underage prostitute did.  You know, it’s getting kind of tiresome, typing “you” over and over.  If the book doesn’t give this second-person character a name soon, I might have to give him one myself.  I’m thinking something along the lines of “Hubert Pubert.”

We then get another quote from The Iliad, with Helen describing herself as a “nasty bitch.”  Cheer up, Helen- you’re not half as nasty as old Hubert here.

Hubert takes a younger woman he plans to sleep with (is there any other kind?) into the Versace Boutique to buy her stuff.  The manager won’t let them in while they’re eating pretzels, so Hubert bribes and bullies him into doing so.  Hubert inwardly laughs at the manager for allowing him such a victory, but is then insulted that the girl finds it funny.  Hubert doesn’t have much of a sense of humour, I’ve found.  Then there’s a quote from General Lee on the nature of war.  Because acting like an entitled dweeb in a clothes shop is exactly the same as leading men into battle.  At least Hubert wasn’t doing it to defend his right to keep slaves, I guess.

Back to the first-person narrator, who also doesn’t have a name yet, remembering himself and his wife being scared by a mouse on their wedding night.  His wife asks him to deal with it, so he smashes its head in with a table leg.  Again, also not the same thing as going into battle.  Maybe if the mouse was armed with a bazooka.

Another quote from The Iliad, with Aganemnon resolving to give Briseis back to Achilles, and then we have Hubert deciding not to discuss his business practices with his girlfriends, so as not to sully their innocent minds.  One of these girlfriends was an underage prostitute.  I’m never going to get tired of pointing that out.

There’s a bunch of statistics regarding the sex industry, concluding, “All told, the American male is clearly not getting what he wants at home.”  Not least because what he wants is teenage girls to fawn over him, and, in real life, they’re annoyingly reluctant to do so.

At work, Hubert wears a bracelet his girlfriend bought him, and is embarrassed when his friends notice.  Hubert imagines that the teenage girls he letches over are just as interested in him, and that their frustrated, cheated-on mothers are angrier with them than they are with him.  The first-person narrator is angry that his wife taught him a trick for using vending machines, and now he can’t ever forget about her because it will mean forgetting how vending machines work.  This is the kind of thing they’re comparing to a ten-year battle against Troy, by the way.

There’s a list of words to do with love and addiction, thus comparing the two.  This is a very original thought.

There is then a strange section that states that people who grow up in poverty and whose sisters become disabled because of this are luckier than people whose children don’t end up at the right university, because they’ve found out earlier on that the world is a harsh and cruel place.  Also, making lots of money and only dating women who are too young to see what an idiot you are is exactly the same thing as “lead(ing) armies into Gaul.”  Just watch out for those bazooka-wielding mice, I guess.

There’s a section that begins:  “Have you ever seen a domesticated dog with its first bone?”  I’m not sure why the narrator felt he had to specify “domesticated.”  Maybe he was worried that the readers wouldn’t know what a dog was.

Hubert is admiring his expensive new car, congratulating himself for not being one of those stupid people who refers to cars as “she.”  There are problems with work, but, on the bright side, he seems to have a wife now.  She doesn’t nag him like his friends’ stupid, awful wives, but he’s still unsatisfied.  Probably because she’s not fourteen.

Hubert drives away from his house to a nearby bar, where a group of college girls ask him about his career and hang on his every word.  They are impressed by his house and his car.  One of the girls takes him back to her room, and is much better in bed than his wife.  Geez, and people called Twilight wish-fulfilment…