At some point in your life, you have to open up your mouth and know what the fuck you’re talking about.
— Spencer Mazio
Christmas Lake Press
Spencer Mazio is an idiot and a genius. A hero and a coward. A star athlete who suffers from debilitating panic. He’s a bookie and a brawler, a womanizer and a fool. Last of the Famous International Playboys is his uproarious and heartbreaking story—a young man from a broken family trying to piece himself together from inside the ivy-covered walls of a famous university suffering from its own identity crisis. Spencer tells his story in an irreverent voice that makes us cry out loud for him and laugh out loud with him, but as he confronts the many versions of himself, he wrestles with identity in a world determined to see him as it wants to. He struggles with the painful paradox of relationships and crashes headlong into the boundaries of masculinity. He’s one part oblivious, another part contributor, and a third part observer as he tries to make sense of it all. But will he?
“The pacing is fantastic throughout, the novel never slags, never gets dull, and at the same time never goes too quickly so as to miss emotional beats. The conversations are fantastic—a great blend of humor, information, character, trust, distrust, all of it. There were scenes that were world class—the baseball games were a particular favorite.”
from Last of the Famous International Playboys
My dad used to say I was fidgety when I was little. And I was. I bit my fingernails constantly. I was forever scratching a hole in my chest. I used to turn the light switch in the downstairs bedroom on and off a couple hundred times a day because I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t. I had this one tic where I’d drop to a knee every few steps. I don’t even know why. I was a nervous, weird little kid. But all the weirdness seemed to calm me down, so I lunged around the house. I lunged from classroom to cafeteria. I even lunged down concrete sidewalks until finally my knees were so bruised and sore I couldn’t walk anymore. I’ve always been this way. There isn’t a time I can remember when I wasn’t anxious about something. You’d never know it to look at me now. I’m six foot two. I weigh a hundred and ninety-five pounds. My grandmother’s friend, Helen, used to tell me I looked like Rudolph Valentino. She even showed me a picture once. I don’t know shit about Rudolph Valentino, but I’m pretty sure he never stood at the end of some innocuous line suffering like a pussy.
The thing is, you grow out of the tics. You can’t keep doing weird shit forever, only when you stop, it’s like you’re on your own to figure out how to manage what’s in your head—the low grade, everyday bullshit that makes you inept around other people, the dread of an uncertain future. It doesn’t matter. Either way, the thoughts keep coming. It’s like they’re not even yours after a while—worried thoughts, anxious thoughts, irrational thoughts—until finally there’s no room left for anything else.
Adam Lenain is an attorney and a graduate of Yale University, where much of the book is set. He lives in southern California with his family, and Last of the Famous International Playboys is his first novel.
What they might be saying about Last of the Famous International Playboys
“Last of the Famous International Playboys invites us to question the authenticity of our personal narratives and the weight of the past on our present, and as such, it necessarily aspires to a mythopoetic function—a deliberate bricolage that, by its nature, is an admission of the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center as mythological, that is to say, an historical illusion in which we achieve the only possible apotheosis: aporia.”
“It makes you laugh; it makes you cry. It’s all that shit.”
“I was wholly absorbed by Last of the Famous International Playboys and its delicate portrait of the human experience. It did me an enormous amount of good in giving me back a little energy, or rather the desire to climb back up again from the dejected state I’m in, except the ending. The ending was very sudden.”
“Last of the Famous International Playboys is a parable that speaks as much to today as it does to the era in which it is set; a book that cuts straight to the shallowness of sanity and the havoc bad luck and grief can wreak on each and every one of us.”
“Last of the Famous International Playboys is a dizzying pastiche of cultural and literary references all shot out of a cannon. The whole thing moves at breakneck speed, and it doesn’t stop until it hits the target. Thoroughly entertaining!”
“The process of art is painstaking. Something like Last of the Famous
International Playboys doesn’t happen overnight... unless you work on it all
night.”
What they are saying . . .
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Kirkus Reviews
A wry, sensitive portrayal of the roiling turbulence of youth in all its messiness.
Spencer’s narration of his travails as a young man, veering between hopelessly depressing and delightfully sardonic moments, will likely remind some readers of a 1990s Holden Caulfield....The tale’s dialogue flows at an impressive pace, with lightning quick conversations broken up by enough muted observations by Spencer to slow it all down….Lenain has crafted an emotional, well-balanced novel that ultimately reminds readers that everyone has an engaging story to tell.
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K. C. Finn, Readers' Favorite ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Author Adam Lenain narrates Spencer's journey in an irreverent and engaging voice, making you both empathize and shake your head at his antics. The close narrative skill makes Spencer deeply relatable. Last of the Famous International Playboys is an uproarious and poignant exploration of the human condition, leaving you both laughing and reflecting long after you've turned the final page.
