SIMON IS IN HOG HEAVEN. . . ISNT HE?
A fifty-three-year-old architect with a "tragise of brick," Simon takes a years sabbatical from his job and his marriage and moves to New York. The apartment he sublets is spacious ay, so when he meets three geous lingerie models -- half his age and a little down on their luck -- at a Lexington Avenue bar, it seems perfectly natural to ihem to move in. The situation, they point out, "has the structure of a male fantasy." Simons houseguests prove to be surprisingly perceptive and intelligent, but they are each a little lost, struggling to find their way in that difficult city. Simon, by turns doting and iive, tempted and horrified, offers them his skewed philosophies of life and love. Privately, he mourns his age, his stalled career, his diminishing sexual prowess, and the iable day when the women will leave him.
In the quirky, inimitable style that has always characterized Donald Barthelmes work, Paradise is a bawdy, optimistid provocative tale of lives meshing in a quixotic world.
"A wry meditation, id melancholy. . . A charming book" -- Newsweek
"Paradise is Barthelmes su, mellowest and most eaining book. He has fixed his eye on the aging, urban man and liberated woman, heir frailties, the dreadful chaos of their lives, and smiled." -- People