Albertine Has Her Copy; Do You?

We obtained the following quote from Amuse-Biatch mascot Albertine regarding Design Flaws of the Human Condition, the debut of our novelist friend, Paul Schmidtberger, "It's both funny and philosophical, kind of like the way that cats can't work can-openers..."

Of the reviewer herself, Paul says, "Albertine used to talk at cocktail parties about reading Proust, but stopped when she realized that people found it standoffish. Then she started again when she remembered that she didn't care what people thought."

It's positively ingenious how pets and their owners come to resemble each other.

Book at Bedtime with Miss XaXa

Just the other night, possums, and not for the first time, Miss XaXa put on her La Perla unmentionables, slipped into a blue silk peignoir, and got into bed with a gay man (though, to be fair, the other two times she didn't know they were gay).

The man's name is Paul Schmidtberger, and he happens to be a friend of ours, so we didn't mind terribly, as it was all en famille.

Of course, for everyone's sake it should be pointed out that it wasn't actually Paul in bed with Miss XaXa. Rather, it was Paul's freshman effort--his debut novel, Design Flaws of the Human Condition, just published by Doubleday--that Miss XaXa carried off into her boudoir.

Given Howie Kleinberg's recent meltdowns (every pugnacious bead of sweat crying out for anger management), it seemed the perfect book to recommend, seeing as how the novel's wry screwball plot revolves around two people who meet at an anger-management class: Iris, a straight woman who happened to run afoul of a moralist in economy class on a flight from Orange County, and Ken, a gay man who caught his boyfriend in bed with another man on the same night he was unjustly fired from his law-firm job for beginning a sentence with the word "and."

But Iris and Ken don't do any of the stereotypical things that gay men and their straight women friends are supposed to do, such as shopping for punishingly Freudian high-heeled shoes, running a blog, or drinking novelty-alcohol-of-the-moment-tinis.

Instead, they agree to nurse grudges and drinks, and engage in a little mutual skulfaggery, with Iris spying on Ken's ex-boyfriend, to make sure the cheating louse is as miserable as he deserves to be, and Ken spying on Iris' current boyfriend, whom she suspects of straying, or at least of liking rural Pennsylvania just a tad more than might be acceptable in polite society.

Not surprisingly, Publishers Weekly called Design Flaws of the Human Condition “a promising debut about love, friendship and anger-management” and “an assuredly entertaining romp.” So if you, like Miss XaXa, fancy an assuredly entertaining romp in your bed, be sure to get yourself a copy.

To give you a better sense of things, this is how Paul explains the origin of his novel:

People often want to know how I came up with the idea for my book. Well, like most of my better ideas, the inspiration for Design Flaws came to me in a bar.

It was in Paris and I was downstairs waiting to use the bathroom while precious Happy Hour minutes ticked away upstairs, only whoever was in there was taking his sweet time. This is the same kind of person who dashes ahead of you into the bathroom in a movie theater right before the movie starts and then makes himself at home and does crossword puzzles or fills out questionnaires aimed at figuring out which career is secretly perfect for him. I hate people like that.

So how do you get somebody else out of the bathroom that you would like to occupy? You don’t. The person inside holds all the cards. Unless, of course, you’re a locksmith, which – tragically – I’m not.

And then it hit me. The light switch. In France, the light switch is always on the outside of the bathroom. God only knows why they do like that, but they do. So if there’s no way to dislodge the person inside, you can at least make his stay there a little less comfortable. Which is to say, pitch black. And it worked!

It’s hard to understand how an entire country like France can get something as simple as where the light switch goes wrong, but they have....

But fun and games aside, the placement of the light switch in the bar is what’s known as a “design flaw,” something I used to read about in law school. The theory of design flaws is that certain products contain imperfections which, with a little extra thinking, might’ve been avoided. The classic example is the Ford Pinto. It was little. It was zippy. It was named after a horse with daring, devil-may-care splashes of color. What’s not to like about it? Well, the fact that they put the gas tank under the rear axle, which meant that it exploded on impact. A great design, but not perfect.

So my inspiration that night was to take the dry, dusty theory of a design flaw and apply it to living, breathing people. People are a miracle of design, but we’re not perfect.

Amuse-Biatch Recommends: Design Flaws of the Human Condition

Well, possums, if Bravo can engage in a momentum-interrupting orgy of promotion tonight, why shouldn’t we?

And so, we’d like to tell you about Paul Schmidtberger.

Paul is a droll writer friend of long standing, and our friendship has, at various times, involved Jean-Paul Gaultier’s hand, Lenny Kravitz’s favorite falafel, the Père Lachaise cemetery, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (though, bien sûr, not all at once).

And now the bitch has gone and gotten a comic novel published. And by Doubleday, no less.

And did we mention that Publisher’s Weekly described the novel as “a promising debut about love, friendship and anger-management” and “an assuredly entertaining romp”? Like we said: Bitch.

Paul, one of the funniest people we know, hails from deepest, darkest New Jersey. Schooley’s Mountain, to be precise. As Paul notes, that’s near Hackettstown, which “is famous because the remains of a wooly mammoth were discovered there,” transported to Harvard, and given the misnomer “Harvard Mastodon.” The mastodon, Paul assures us, was “the last candidate from Hackettstown to get into Harvard.”

Paul himself went to Yale, then did the whole Lost in Translation thing in Japan before Sofia Coppola made winsome, quasi-comedic, Tokyo-based anomie fashionable. Then, of course, he cornered the market in anomie by going to work for an international law firm that was like the collective hallucination of Stanley Kubrick, the Marx Brothers, and the now-deceased Supreme Leader of Turkmenistan.

Paul’s travails at the law firm ended thus: “Typically, the decision to leave a law firm is one that’s undertaken after careful consideration and reflection. In my case, the firm made things easier by firing me, marching me downstairs, and throwing me out onto the street. Me and the apple I'd been planning to have for a snack that afternoon. Hey, thanks.”

And now, Doubleday has published Paul’s first novel, Design Flaws in the Human Condition. The back of the book tells you all:

Set in Manhattan - the conniption capital of the world - a riotously funny and fresh debut novel about anger, infidelity, and friendship.

Through a hilarious series of events, two strangers find themselves railroaded into an anger-management class, where they soon become fast friends. Iris is there because of an eminently justifiable meltdown on a crowded flight, whereas Ken got caught defacing library books with rude (but true!) messages about his former boyfriend - the boyfriend that he caught in bed with another man on the same night he got fired from his job proofreading in a law firm.

Needless to say, Iris and Ken were cosmically destined to be friends. What follows is a strikingly original comedy of (occasionally bad) manners as Ken enlists Iris to infiltrate his ex-boyfriend’s life in the hope of discovering that he’s miserable. And Iris reciprocates, dispatching Ken to work himself into the confidence of her own boyfriend who she suspects, is starting to stray. But what if Ken's ex isn’t crying himself to sleep? What if he’s not the amoral fiend Ken wants to believe he is? And what should Iris do when her worst suspicions start to come true? Exactly how perfect do we have the right to expect our fellow human beings to be?

Anger, betrayal, loyalty, and friendship - Design Flaws of the Human Condition explores these universal themes with wisdom, compassion, and a wickedly irreverent sense of humor.

And did we mention Paul is single?

The current issue of Out magazine had this to say:

“Debut novelist Schmidtberger’s take is very funny, and his hilarious observations about contemporary urban life, from its escapable therapy-speak to the damage done to the skyline by Donald Trump, play well alongside this ultimately sentimental story about the virtues of friendship. ... Schmidtberger’s wryly wrought characters lend authenticity to this confection of a summer novel.”

Doesn’t it sound like just the sort of thing to get you through the dog days of summer (or the rainy days of summer if you’re on the East Coast) and boring patches of Top Chef?

So get thee to Paul’s website, and to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or your local book emporium and get thee a copy. And write to Paul and let him know how much you liked it, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll explain about Jean-Paul Gaultier.

And now, as an amuse-bouche from Amuse-Biatch, to whet your appetite, here is the first page of the novel:

PROLOGUE. In Which the Peace and Tranquility of Manhattan Are Disturbed by an Unusual Meteorological Phenomenon.

Helvetica Carlyle, née Fahrtstaller, had never gotten a cab that quickly in her entire life, and Helvetica Carlyle, it has to be said, was an extremely demanding woman.

Was being the operative word.

At thirty-two feet per second, it took only about 3.8 seconds for her body to plunge from the seventeenth floor of her Park Avenue co-op down onto - or more precisely, through - the roof of the taxi that had just pulled up to the awning outside the building. The cab driver, one of three Bangladeshi brothers who shared a single studio apartment, a single driver’s license, and a single counterfeit green card, panicked and clawed his way out of the car, leaving the passengers, a well-dressed elderly couple, sitting face-to-face with the corpse. They exchanged a long look before the wife finally sighed, leaned forward, bent back what remained of one of Helvetica’s ears and peered behind it.

“Oh, that lying little such and such,” she said. “She did have work done.”