Review: Friday Night Club By Harry Ritchie Essay, Research Paper

Nice guys finish firstFriday Night Clubby Harry Ritchie328pp, Hodder Here we have one of a tentative new breed of novel introducing a tentative new breed of male, 36 years old and already psyching himself up to leave his teenage years behind, shedding the chrysalis of Ageing Boy to flutter the modest pastel wings of Sensitive Man. Here also is one of that less-than-tentative new breed of male author who hope to cash in handsomely by offering women a gratifying “I-thought-as-much” archeological dig into the muddy layers of men’s egos. (The author compares favourably to Nick Hornby.)And so to our entertaining tale: three not-so-young, not-so-successful Scottish lads are looking forward to their regular night out with the love of their lives, an über-lad named Rob (flash city job, flash bachelor pad, a calendar of nubile blondes made flesh). But Rob has done a runner – and despite the fact they’ve known him for 20 years, it now takes mere days to figure out there was no über-lad, only a big fat blob of bullshit.The women-pleasing moral of the story is that the good life as portrayed by Rob (sex, drugs, dosh, no wedding rings) is just a delinquent male fantasy, and the only thing for men to do is to settle down with some nice sensible woman. The sop to the male reader is that the boy in the book who lands said sensible woman is a balding ginger runt, which proves you don’t have to be an oil-painting providing you’re a reliable sort of a chap who agrees with everything your girlfriend says. The author’s other sop to the male is that all the sensible girls in the book have nice hair and lovely tits, as if they’d trotted straight out of a novel by Kingsley Amis.Will the genre last? Possibly. It’s a bit of a con, with all the humble kowtowing to female superiority, but it panders nicely to women’s age-old contempt for men, and to men’s new-fangled uneasiness with themselves.Will its author last? Harry Ritchie, erstwhile literary editor of the Sunday Times, tells a lot of good jokes, is a dab hand at cutting observation and knows how to turn on the charm. Yep, he’ll last.