Plot

Suffering from writer's block and eagerly awaiting his writing award, Harry Block remembers events from his past and scenes from his best-selling books as characters, real and fictional, come back to haunt him.

Harry Block is a well-regarded novelist whose tendency to thinly-veil his own experiences in his work, as well as his un-apologetic attitude and his proclivity for pills and whores, has left him with three ex-wives that hate him. As he is about to be honored for his writing by the college that expelled him, he faces writer's block and the impending marriage of his latest flame to a writer friend. As scenes from his stories and novels pass and interact with him, Harry faces the people whose lives he has affected - wives, lovers, his son, his sister.—Gary Dickerson <slug@mail.utexas.edu>

Harry Block, an atheist who grew up in a Jewish home, is a successful New York based writer of novels and short stories. That success has resulted in him being honored imminently in a special ceremony upstate at Adair University, from where he was expelled when he was a student. However his personal life is a mess, as viewed by his stories, all which have some element of autobiography, either directly or as an allegory to issues in his life. Thus, most of the people about who he writes hate him because he exposes what should be their private lives to public scrutiny. Those people include three ex-wives and counting, Lucy, a former married sister-in-law with who he was cheating when he was married to Lucy's sister Jane, but who he left for a younger woman, and his estranged half-sister Doris, who re-embraced her Jewish faith when she married her current husband, Burt. Lee, that younger woman who he claims is the true love of his life, recently left him for one of Harry's friends, Larry. The day before the honoring ceremony in the midst of a writer's block, Harry, in therapy, realizes that his love life is as screwed up as when he was a young man, he always doing something to sabotage relationships, while preferring the company of whores if only to place sex in a business context. He wants someone to go with him to the ceremony, most specifically his adolescent son Hilliard, which Hilly's mother, Joan, who is still bitter toward Harry, will not allow. As he drives upstate to Adair, Harry picks up a few people and makes a few stops along the way. Who also follow him are a few of his stories' characters, who, if Harry will listen to them, may give him a better insight into his dysfunctional life.—Huggo

Untrustworthy, philandering, and insecure, the foul-mouthed, self-centred, and pill-popping novelist, Harry Block, has made a habit of using the lives of others--including his lovers, family, friends and ex-wives--for inspiration. However, now that he's about to receive an honorary award from his college, Harry finds himself up against a persistent case of writer's block, and as if that weren't enough, his latest girlfriend is leaving him for his best friend. However, enough is enough, and Harry will have to pay the price and see the error of his ways. Will Harry face his demons? Above all, is he capable of change?—Nick Riganas