Kicked out of Yale at age fourteen, Judd Breslau falls in with Phillips Chatterton, a bathrobe-wearing Egyptologist working out of a dilapidated home laboratory. There, young Valerie Chatterton quickly leads Judd away from his research and into, in order: the attic, a Colorado equestrian ranch, a porn studio beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and a jail cell in southern Iraq, where we find him awaiting his own execution while the war rages on in the north. Written by a ninety-year-old debut novelist, ex-Marine, two-time Oscar nominee (screenwriting, Bad Day at Black Rock and Take the High Ground!), and co-creator of Mr. Magoo, Bowl of Cherries rivals the liveliest comic novels for sheer gleeful inventiveness — this is a book of astounding breadth and sharp consequence, containing all the joy and derangement and terror and doubt of adolescence and of our time.
