You, Him, Whoever

Philip Connors

• White Guys by Anthony Giardina
  Heinemann, 371 pp, £11.99, August 2006, ISBN 0 434 01605 5

Timmy O’Kane, the protagonist of Anthony Giardina’s fourth novel, lives in suburban Massachusetts and works as a salesman for an academic publisher. He visits universities and tries to persuade professors to buy the firm’s anthologies, the most popular of which he calls ‘White Guys’:

‘White Guys’ sells in the hundreds of thousands annually. It is the text of choice at community colleges and for the less imaginative graduate assistants at the big state universities. It begins with an excerpt from Charles Brockden Brown and his 18th-century religious maniacs and ends with a story about a lovesick football coach in late 20th-century Albuquerque. Though it is not, of course, literally comprised of stories written only by white males, the bulk is still there: it is a testicular view of America, unquestionably.