Robert Gover (1) (1929–2015)

A white and uptight college doofus and future master of the universe type visits a brothel purely for research purposes and meets a black, 14 year old hooker named Kitten. She sees him as her “invessment” and gives him the key to her apartment. He thinks he’s playing her, and visa versa. They cannot understand each other when they talk. He doesn’t get jazz. “One minute it was very loud and the next it wasn’t.” Hilarity ensues. This book is so non-PC that it wouldn’t be published today.… (plus d'informations)

I read One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding in the 1960s and thought it enormously funny and daring. My present reading reminds me of my re-reading, in my forties, of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye —and wondering why I ever thought it was so great, except maybe because I was eighteen the first time. I’m not sure why one of these reminds me of the other. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield most likely came from a richer family, was brighter and more maladjusted, and would never have done anything so social as join a fraternity. Gover’s James Cartwright Holland (Jimmy) is one-dimensional by comparison. So maybe all they have in common is being white male teenagers. (I’m beginning to like the idea of Holden Caulfield meeting up with Kitten. But that would be another book.)

Gover’s Kitten is a fourteen-year-old black prostitute, just entering her adolescence in a world that demands she mature at rocket speed. Nineteen-year-old Jimmy, on the verge of exiting adolescence, is cradled in the amniotic fluid of his college fraternity, where practicing for manhood means drinking hard and trying to get laid. Jimmy is part straight man, part buffoon; he is smug, self-righteous, judgmental. His depth can be measured by a one-ml eye dropper. He is the stereotypical overprivileged, shallow, arrogant white European male, the archetypal WASP.

Gover’s sympathetic portrayal of the young, black prostitute contrasts with his slightly jaundiced depiction of a white, middle-class college sophomore. Despite the imbalance (or maybe because of it), the literary device of giving each character alternating chapters to describe their personal view of the action is what creates the comedy. And it is funny. The one hundred dollar misunderstanding comes about when Jimmy, who thinks pounding faster and harder is the way to wowing his sexual partners, believes that Kitten has taken a shine to him, that his manly talent has captured the fancy (maybe even the heart) of a “professional.”

The first time I read it, it was hilarious. This go-round it’s just funny and an interesting product of its time in history. The difference is likely my greater distance in age from Jimmie and Kitten, as well as changes in society. Although, if what one of my male friends says is true, it is still the goal of many a lothario to get free sex from a prostitute who finds him too good to resist.… (plus d'informations)