This novel is a delightful romp through the not-too-successful life of Mark, who seeks love but is always thwarted. Alexander’s prose is at times moving and funny, because we can all recognise situations we’ve been in before, when we’ve picked up the wrong kind of guy, thought the guy was looking at us and he wasn’t, got the guy home and found things just weren’t destined to turn out the way we expected.
Mark’s adventures take him – among other places – to the South of France (where he lives for most of the time) and the United States. He does eventually find the man he dreamed about long before, although that doesn’t turn out quite as Mark expected, but to say more would be a spoiler.
I respect people who self-publish, as I suspect Alexander has. It is not to be confused with vanity publishing, whereby you pay an unscrupulous company that has massaged your writer’s ego, then takes the money and leaves you with loads of unsold copies of your opus. People like Alexander put a lot of time and effort into marketing, and I was pleased to see a short review for 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye in December’s Gay Times.
My only niggles were stylistic. A good copy editor would have sorted out some punctuation problems and the odd misuse of words, such as the past tense of “lie” (“lay”) used as the present tense in several places. But these are minor in a book that, through a series of entertaining vignettes, leads us through Mark’s bumbling life to a rather shocking climax.