A gay writer in Manhattan wakes up after a steamy night spent with a “gorgeous stranger” to find his hunky trick next to him in bed, dead as a doornail.
Comic novel shows how ‘There’s a body in my bed’ turns into a ticket for success
Fiction: In a YA writer’s debut novel for adults, so much depends on a grim morning after.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
November 25, 2024 at 3:00PM
Hijinks ensue.
If this setup sounds like your cup of skinny no-foam latté, dive in to Daniel Aleman’s “I Might Be in Trouble.” You’ll find outlandish situations, a few twisty surprises, comic relief. Call it “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, With Corpse.”
The trouble in the novel’s title refers to the grave situation faced by narrator David, a novelist who finds himself, at 28, single and broke. His sometimes supportive father denies David a loan, sensibly suggesting instead that he “get a real job.”
While David’s first book got great reviews and became “one of the top selling debut novels of 2021,” he has burned through half a million dollars in earnings and suffered a dud of a sophomore novel. His publisher rejected David’s manuscript for book number three. Stacey, his plucky, chirpy den mother of a literary agent, assures him that he just needs to “live a little” to come up with a new book idea that will boost his mood, his reputation and his bank account.
Enter Robert, a good-looking hedge fund manager, who is visiting New York from Los Angeles and who meets David online. Robert has “the kind of eyes I could get lost in forever,” David muses in one of a growing pile of pulpy romance clichés after the two meet online. They have the “best sex ever” at Robert’s palatial suite at the Plaza, then go out for a night of binge drinking and club-hopping.
Dazzled, David figures that “a story has found me, and it’s much better than anything I could’ve come up with myself.” Just like Herman Melville and that large whale.
While Robert’s death the next morning — stroke? drug overdose? we never really find out — is bad for him, it presents David, and soon enough, his agent, with a golden opportunity in the form of a book idea. But first they determine it’ll be best if they move the corpse from David’s apartment back to Robert’s hotel room.
The broad-daylight body-transport caper places a tremendous strain on credulity, and can best be viewed through a comic lens. This instigating situation weighs down the rest of the fast-paced book, which has trouble balancing elements of madcap romance, thriller, suspense and family drama.
Will David get a saleable book out of it? Is Robert’s celebrity boyfriend, who asks David to ghost-write a memoir, wise to what happened that night? What is up with the mean, domineering stepmom? Will David and Stacey avoid detection? Can David and his ex-boyfriend, Jeremy, relight the fire?
Aleman draws Stacey with genuine affection, but she is a type more than a believable person. Key to this formulaic story is a hero we can cheer for, or at least relate to. Alas, David is composed less of unique characteristics, identifying details and quirky believability than woe-is-me whining, ill-timed and timeworn romantic yearnings and terrible choices. We are given only the faintest notion of what made his first novel a breakout success.
Although there is this: He values commercial success and being a famous “published author” over, say, writing well.
Claude Peck, a former Star Tribune editor and columnist, lives in Minneapolis.
I Might Be in Trouble
By: Daniel Aleman.
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 336 pages, $29.
St. Paul writer Kao Kalia Yang has won four Minnesota Book Awards and was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
