Anyone Got a Match? by Max Shulman (1964)

Anyone Got a Match?
by Max Shulman
Publisher:  Harper & Row, Publishers
Copyright:  1964
Book Club Edition

This is a funny novel about the four gravest threats we face -- cigarettes, food, TV, and love.

A funny novel about the potential evils of cigarettes and food . . .?

Yes, very, you'll agree as you meet, among others, seventy-five-year-old Jefferson Tatum, the lord of Owens Mill, self-made and mightiest of cigarette tycoons.  (". . . Despite a new wisdom tooth, a thrombosed hemorrhoid, and a three-per-cent drop in cigarette sales, he put in his usual twelve hours of work, then attended the company's birthday party for him where he drank an entire Mason jar of white mule, two-stepped with every lady worker present, hand-wrestled the shredding-room foreman, ate a chunk of cake the size of your head and then went home with Millie and Esther McCabe, the twins from packaging.")  Brawler that he was, Jefferson's defense of his product against the "health-scare nuts" was a sensationally vigorous offense against everything else humanly ingestible, mainly food.

Now take television, and consider Ira Shapian, also a tycoon but more self-loathing than self-made, whose problem was to break his golden ($3,000 per week) chains.  ("Ira's job was to nice.  In television, to nice is a verb, generally transitive.  It means to inspire confidence, no small thing in television where, in the main, actors are paranoiac, agents are mendacious, and advertising men are haunted by the knowledge that if they should disappear, nobody would notice it.")

Or take love, which had given Ira periods of unaccustomed bliss with his wonderful, cool, beautiful wife Polly; but had likewise give him, he reflected, the very fiscal trap he ached to elude.

On the other hand love had also given Ira balm for his affliction, in the person of the lady known as "Boo" -- Barbara Ogilive Owens -- the tall, smooth, poised-but-passionate patrician of Owens Mill:  Boo, with her connection with Jefferson Tatum, who might . . . who just might . . . provide the way out of all Ira's woes.

These characters, along with other memorable humans, and these threats, along with other interesting foibles, are the ingredients of this superb comic novel.  Blended ingeniously by Max Shulman's satiric genius, they result in a highly combustible -- indeed, a hilariously explosive -- mixture . . . .

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is discolored and shows wear and small tears, creasing and tears in the edges.  Pages are tanned and darkening from age.  Front endpaper is darkened by a book club leaflet.  Previous owner's name and date are written on the front endpaper. Binding is in the beginning stages of splitting, but pages are in tact.

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