Cheerleaders from Gomorrah: Tales from the Lycra Archipelago

I think my macho guy husband saw himself in some of the characters. He thinks he's so tough. I howled all the way through this book. I thought it was clever, strange and a revealing look at what Western U.S. is coming to. It sounded like Lake Tahoe in places. I recommend it to women (like me) who love but like to keep reality in check about our REI guys.

The book is essentially a masculine grieving. It opens with a short story of two women dedicated to the sport of recreational flirting in a town that was once a forgotten outpost of a remote, mountainous never-never land. Rember remembers Idaho's Salmon River area as the frontier left it and is contrasting that lamented, unspoiled never-never land with what it has become, a degenerate and deplorable home of spandex-hipped players, drug-weary bar-flies, faux cowboys and 40-year-old, empty nomads known endearingly as ski-bums. Sun Valley, herein thinly-veiled, is the setting for a number of stories that put a set of modern day, wasted, woebegone characters into an environment that once demanded, if they were to survive, the best of men and women. Civilization, shored up by technology, is revealed to be nevertheless puny and insubstantial, and the recurring characters, or named characters, devoted to the pursuit of pleasurable activities, stitch together stories that use the power of fiction to paint psychotic pictures of a ruined world. I don't want fiction to simply tell me what I, for some reason, am not able to see with my own eyes; I want it to create a world that can't exist except in my inner vision, and Rember's book is just that: an mainly-humorous, mainly-accurate literary acid trip. And the inner vision is a nightmare of despoiled Nature.

I see a midlife crisis in this brain vomit. Don't stop now.