Pleasure and guilt make mischievous bedfellows in Stephen McCauley’s witty send-up of modern love, sex, and real estate.
Boston real estate agent William Collins knows that his habits are slipping out of control. Due to obsessive-compulsive daily cleaning binges and a penchant for nightly online cruising for hookups, he finds his sales figures slipping despite a booming market. There’s also his ongoing struggle to collect the rent from his passive-aggressive tenant and his worries about his best friend, Edward, whom he’s certainly not in love with. Just as he decides to do something about his life, he meets Charlotte and Samuel, wealthy suburbanites looking for the perfect city apartment. “Happy couple,” he writes in his notes. “Maybe I can learn something from them.” What he ultimately discovers challenges his own assumptions about real estate, love, and desire—and what they learn from him might unravel a budding friendship, not to mention a very promising sale.
Full of crackling dialogue delivered by a stellar ensemble of players, Alternatives to Sex is a smart, hilarious chronicle of life in posttraumatic, morally ambiguous America—where the desire to do good is constantly being tripped up by the need to feel good. Right now.
Stephen McCauley is the author of The Object of My Affection, True Enough, and Alternatives to Sex. Many of his books have been national bestsellers, and three have been made into feature films. The New York Times Book Review dubbed McCauley “the secret love child of Edith Wharton and Woody Allen”, and he was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. His fiction, reviews, and articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, Vogue, and many other publications. He currently serves as Co-Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University. He has several properties listed on Airbnb in Massachusetts and New York and owns a total of zero toss pillows.View all by Stephen McCauley
