The Dude Who Did Dictionaries

Frank Flutie is a lexicographer who has waged war on the "perils of adultolescence" by leaving a high-paying job as a copywriter for an advertising company called The Banker and taking a low-paying job in a bookstore instead, ostensibly so he can write the first ever all sexual dictionary. The "war" (and his dictionary), however, aren't going particularly well and, under the stress of his "self-imposed exile" from affluence, Frank has become petty and fatalistic -- "a shit hoarder whose dictionary would be better utilized as a flyswatter, a doorstop, or a paperweight". Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Marlene in bed because (or so he believes), "If you got no dough, no woman will love you." On the mantle in Frank's shabby apartment is a sickly but unkillable pet sea lamprey -- a jawless fish he abhors as the banner of the sort of "clockwork universe" he is fleeing from in his downward spiral. In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all -- that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself.