About Harry Towns

By Bruce Jay Friedman

When he published this novel in 1972, acclaimed master of modern humour Bruce Jay Friedman more or less invented the male mid-life crisis.

Harry Towns is past forty, a sometime successful screenwriter with a failing marriage, dying parents, a son he can’t seem to connect with – and a taste for airline stewerdesses and cocaine. Brilliant, at times surreal, we follow his haphazard move out of the family home and into a fancy tower in central Manhattan. He furnishes his new apartment in true mid-century bachelor style, all leather sofas and glass tables – perfect for entertaining women, and, increasingly, drug dealers. Released from the ties of marriage, he still yearns for the domestic routine of home with his son, and his once pretty wife who tries to lure him back with her home-made stews. But the freewheeling, decadent ambience of 1970s New York proves too enticing – and Harry is not a man to resist.

There is a trip to Las Vegas with his son, and, as Harry’s life seems to spiral out of control, a road trip across America. But all the good things of the consumer age – drugs, easy girls, gambling, travel – cannot take him out of his own isolation. Full of mordant wit and deadpan humour, with an ambience redolent of TV’s Mad Men, in Harry Towns Friedman created a character who embodies the malaise of the modern urban male, struggling to adjust to life in the new America.