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Product Description
Is it too Late for this Professional Player to Find True Love?; This US best-seller was a Main Selection of the Black Expressions Book Club. L.A. native Rodney Hampton is a pro at juggling women. At 33, he's dated no less than 133 women, but not one of them could convince him to stick around. But when his best friend and long-time partner in crime Timothy Waters gets married, Rodney begins to wonder if his ailing mother is right - is it really time to settle down? With his sister, a single mother of three, reminding him that single life is not all fun and games and that he's made mistakes of his own, Rodney realises that he might have already missed his chance. After compiling a list of ex-girlfriends, he sets out in search of three prospects at matrimony. But will anyone of this diverse trio let this "love 'em and leave 'em" man back into her life? Or is Rodney headed for a rude awakening?
Amazon.com Review
Lounge lizard, PR man, and con artist Rodney Hampton imagines monogamy as a kind of hell, and considers himself a juggler of women, a virtuoso at casual sex. But when his best friend ties the knot, the hero of One Woman Short gets spooked. He's now 33 and has dated 133 women. Will he ever find the One who will convert him to the monogamous creed? Or is she somewhere back there in the past, among the dozens of increasingly interchangeable faces and bodies?
Best known as a chronicler of hip-hop, Nelson George spent many years penning culture pieces for The Village Voice. No wonder One Woman Short suffers from a problem endemic to novels by critics--it seems to waver somewhere on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, often resembling a piece of cultural commentary rather than an act of the imagination. Apt yet strangely disembodied observations disrupt the story ("The nineties, a time people once thought would introduce the paperless office, has in fact been a decade where more trees have been killed than ever before in history.") And Rodney himself sometimes appears less like a character and more like a symbolic figure--a walking, talking embodiment of various 20th-century American trends. There's no reason, of course, why Rodney shouldn't be a relentless exponent of pop culture. Growing up African American in Los Angeles, we're told, he always felt "a missing character in Boyz N the Hood--one who stood firmly between Ice Cube's ghetto pragmatism and Cuba Gooding's collegiate aspirations." Still, his instants of emotional nakedness come when all this pop-cultural static falls away and he must confront his dying mother, her house lost to fire, her mind fading in a subpar retirement home. These sad moments truly compel the reader. And while Rodney would probably be an annoying flake with a wandering eye in the real world, it's to George's credit that he manages to become likable, and even intermittently tragic, on the page. --Emily White
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