SLICED TOMATI
A novel by Kurt Mueller
Trade paperback: $15.00
D E S C R I P T I O N
Vince Tomati is a little mixed up. Television comedy writer. Wannabe novelist. Good boy. Bad boy. Father. Husband. Lover. Lapsed Catholic. Generous tipper. Music aficionado. Lover of the outdoors. Lover of too much liquor. Living in New York. Dreaming of the Ozarks. He’s hilarious, everybody says so. But the joke’s on him. His life is in pieces. Everyone that knows Vince has a different perspective and can’t wait to tell us what a stand-up guy he is, but Vince thinks his life is on another channel. As he searches for the truth of his life all he seems to get is static interference. Maybe God is a comedy script writer, too. Or just another lousy network exec obsessed with the bottom line.
E X C E R P T
My little brother was a piece of work. Seriously. His real problem was that he somehow got the idea that he was different than the rest of us. Presumably better. More accurately, I should say that attitude of superiority was the root of all his problems. I’ll cut him some slack because he got that peculiar delusion from his father. I don’t know how the obsession with Italian culture developed. It ain’t an excuse for anyone to be holier than thou. Pop read a lot, but he really wasn’t that educated. He had a collection of identical leather-bound classic books, but I never saw him read any of them. He read the same crap everyone else did. The Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post were his fodder, and he reluctantly parted with back issues, because you never know when you might need to prove something you read once. He had some sort of romantic idea about writers and thought one of us should become a writer. He named me Francesco Petrarca. I was followed by Dante Alonzo, then Lorenzo Boccaccio. We never acknowledged those overblown names in public. We went by Frank, Donny and Larry. It’s ironic that Pop gave up the fancy naming thing when he got to Little Vinny, considering Vinny’s the only one of us kids that actually tried to become a writer. Go figure. Then there was Angela. She didn’t count for much from the very beginning.