After his zodiac chart is read by a great psychic, Joel Eisenberg studies astrology and becomes the most famous media queen in the field. The author of a best-selling book and a nationally syndicated radio show regular, Joel manages to parlay his intuitive skills, gift for gab, and unbridled shamelessness by getting all the cute guys home for a reading and convincing them to expose their rear ends for a dose of 'chakra balancing.'
But now it's 1997. There are no more phone calls and Joel is publicly humiliated on his radio show. Believing that he should travel north to meet the soul mate who's been predicted for him, Joel goes to Cape Cod. Looking for a man who "paints houses," Joel moves into the home of Dennis Fairchild, a successful artist with a stupendous rear end. What Joel doesn't realize is that his real soul mate is probably Bill Doyle, the 'house painter' living in Dennis's backyard, fixing up the artist's home, drinking heavily, and still commun-icating with his deceased lover.
A comic tale of karmic redemption, Tush shows that when we're foolishly pursuing the wrong goals, the universe wisely knows how to make us suffer for our stupidity.
Review
Humor is hard. Even from bitchy homosexuals, who often confuse acidic bon mots for real wit. But I liked this campy story - about a thirty-something gay Jewish astrologer who lures young men into his apartment in order to admire, and play with, their bums - for the same reason that I singled out Sweet Lips from the reams of erotica I read this year: it's a fine example of genre reading. The humor, campy and queeny and facile as it was, worked for me on an overcast, gloomy day. It's certainly not the most literary book published in '06 by Carroll & Graf, but it was a heck of a lot of fun.
