Topical Guide 530
Mark Dorset
Personality Characteristics and Emotional States, Representing
Personality Characteristics and Emotional States, Assessing
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 6:
He takes his martini into the bathroom. He shaves. It is, he tells himself, one of those days when his face seems to be aging well. The wrinkles around his eyes make it look as if he laughs a lot. His jaw has become stronger over the years, he thinks. His hairline has receded suddenly, in the last year or so, after having held steady for a decade and a half, following an early recession in his twenties, but it doesn’t look so bad today, and he’s noticed that many men younger than he are losing their hair more quickly. […] He brushes his teeth with his rotary electric toothbrush, a gadget that claims to remove more than ninety percent of his dental plaque. He rinses his mouth with hydrogen peroxide […] and then inspects his teeth in the mirror. He holds a scale to them, a narrow plastic card with gradations of color from white to brown printed on it. Are his teeth getting whiter? He can’t be sure, but he thinks that they might be, and he’s heartened by the thought that he’s doing something to reverse the yellowing process, fighting it, not just lying there and taking it.
Forrest Rogers, “Reservations Recommended,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution:
Matthew Barber is a toy company executive desperately seeking psychological—and sexual—satisfaction. His guide through the miasma of modern life is his pseudonymous alter ego, rakish restaurant reviewer B. W. Beath.
Matthew is a divorced 43-year-old former “fat boy” who’s an expert at burying his emotions. But when moonlighting as Boston’s galloping gastronome B. w. Beath, Matthew becomes an incisive raconteur who uses his rapier-sharp wit to skewer restaurants and the clientele with reviews that reek of social commentary. […]
And as Matthew’s and B. W.’s egos collide, a new man emerges.
“Reservations Recommended” is a psychosexual “tour de farce” that details Matthew’s attempts to break out from his self-imposed mediocrity, […] and one man’s search for his place in a world that has passed him by.
See also:
Personality Characteristics and Emotional Stability, Assessing TG 119
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