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What's Wrong With Dorfman? by John Blumenthal
Meet Martin Dorfman, cynic, hypochondriac, and burned-out screenwriter. In the midst of navigating his latest film script through Hollywood Development Hell-an agonizing journey even for the healthiest person-the forty-year-old Dorfman wakes up one morning with a mysterious disease. Venturing into the lunatic fringes of alternative medicine, Dorfman encounters his innermost demons, as well as the be-guil---ing Delilah Foster, a fellow hypochondriac. Will Dorfman find a cure? Will his movie get made? Will he run away with Delilah Foster? And most importantly, what indeed is wrong with Dorfman? This wryly witty book with engagingly wacky characters will have readers laughing out loud. More than just the plight of one man, What's Wrong With Dorfman? humorously reflects the angst of modern society and asks, 'Aren't we all a little nuts?'
Paperback
First published May 20, 2000
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About the author
John Blumenthal
13 books106 followersBack in the day, I was an editorial staffer at Esquire, and later an editor, writer and columnist at Playboy magazine. Then came four years of screenwriting (2 movies made: "Short Time"-- Fox and "Blue Streak"--Sony) ), followed by my present line of work--novelist. I have plied that trade for about 15 years.
My sixth novel, THE STRANGE COURTSHIP OF ABIGAIL BIRD (Regal House) was published in October 2019. (It recently won the 2019 Next Generation Book Award for Fiction.)
I have written eight other books for publishers such as St. Martin's Press, Simon & Schuster and Ballantine Books. These include the novels, "The Case of the Hardboiled Dicks," "The Tinseltown Murders," the award-winning "What’s Wrong with Dorfman?" and "Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour" as well as the recently-published "Three and a Half Virgins".
My articles have appeared in TV Guide, Punch, The National Lampoon, Los Angeles Times, Today's Health, Mens Life, American Woman, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Sun Times, Oui, Salon.com, Huff Post, Publishers Weekly and numerous other publications.
I've also written for television and am the co-author of the movies "Blue Streak" (Sony Pictures) and "Short Time" (Fox).
I'm introverted and admittedly somewhat lazy by nature, so I decided to become an author at the age of 9 when I realized I could do it at home. An early influence was Mark Twain, who often wrote in bed in his pajamas,. Very civilized.
I was born in Middletown, NY, the son of a physician and a stay-at-home mom. I attended Tufts University where I majored in English, with a minor in Not-Being-Drafted-And-Sent-To-Vietnam.
My father was both a neurotic and a hypochondriac, which provided me with enough material for two novels. The mere concept of a hypochondriac physician is literary gold.
After college, I became a whale’s tooth polisher (true) for a scrimshaw carver on Nantucket Island. It was during this Melville-esque dental hygiene career that I wrote a humorous, self-deprecating letter to the editor of Esquire and was hired as a fact checker.
I live in Santa Monica, CA with my wife and an adorable but not very bright canine. I have two delightful adult daughters.
Why do I write? Partly because I have a compulsive need to express myself, partly because I don’t have to commute and partly because I’m not much good at anything else.
#TheStrangeCourtshipOfAbigailBird
FOLLOW ME ON GOODREADS
My sixth novel, THE STRANGE COURTSHIP OF ABIGAIL BIRD (Regal House) was published in October 2019. (It recently won the 2019 Next Generation Book Award for Fiction.)
I have written eight other books for publishers such as St. Martin's Press, Simon & Schuster and Ballantine Books. These include the novels, "The Case of the Hardboiled Dicks," "The Tinseltown Murders," the award-winning "What’s Wrong with Dorfman?" and "Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour" as well as the recently-published "Three and a Half Virgins".
My articles have appeared in TV Guide, Punch, The National Lampoon, Los Angeles Times, Today's Health, Mens Life, American Woman, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chicago Sun Times, Oui, Salon.com, Huff Post, Publishers Weekly and numerous other publications.
I've also written for television and am the co-author of the movies "Blue Streak" (Sony Pictures) and "Short Time" (Fox).
I'm introverted and admittedly somewhat lazy by nature, so I decided to become an author at the age of 9 when I realized I could do it at home. An early influence was Mark Twain, who often wrote in bed in his pajamas,. Very civilized.
I was born in Middletown, NY, the son of a physician and a stay-at-home mom. I attended Tufts University where I majored in English, with a minor in Not-Being-Drafted-And-Sent-To-Vietnam.
My father was both a neurotic and a hypochondriac, which provided me with enough material for two novels. The mere concept of a hypochondriac physician is literary gold.
After college, I became a whale’s tooth polisher (true) for a scrimshaw carver on Nantucket Island. It was during this Melville-esque dental hygiene career that I wrote a humorous, self-deprecating letter to the editor of Esquire and was hired as a fact checker.
I live in Santa Monica, CA with my wife and an adorable but not very bright canine. I have two delightful adult daughters.
Why do I write? Partly because I have a compulsive need to express myself, partly because I don’t have to commute and partly because I’m not much good at anything else.
#TheStrangeCourtshipOfAbigailBird
FOLLOW ME ON GOODREADS
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 25, 2019
This book is pretty good but I’m the author, ergo totally biased and therefore not to be trusted.
August 19, 2015
I put off reading What's Wrong with Dorfman as long as I could. Not because I was afraid it wouldn't be good. I knew it would be terrific, which is why I finally gave in and read it. I read it despite knowing that whatever was wrong with Dorfman would soon be wrong with me. I was right, of course. This is precisely what happened.
Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace was John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.
Dorfman's dad was a doctor, a medical doctor. He was such a conscientious doctor he took the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonished the three of them repeatedly, whenever they were in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurred to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they worked up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.
It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who did other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father was the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he was neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.
Living with such nuttiness it would be expected of Dorfman to be neurotic, too. Unless the experts have re-defined neurosis, or if in fact there even is such a disorder anymore. For the sake of coherence here, let us say there is indeed such a thing as neurosis. Let us say further it's pretty damned clear Dorfman and his doctor dad were both neurotic nightmares.
I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what was wrong with Dorfman was caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a notion. He spent tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He sought treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.
It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he met in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.
Dorfman, by the way, is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. While he suffers with the uncertainty of his intermittent symptoms—that's another thing, they come and go unpredictably—his screenplay, a comic cop story, is undergoing the horrendous Hollywood sausage grinder committee process that could ruin him for good if it fails, or save his career if it ever becomes a movie.
Yikes, my own neuroses (yes, me too), which I've pretty much maneuvered into dormancy over the years, are giving me flashback pains in the abdomen by my merely recounting what's wrong with Dorfman's life. I must go now before I contract sympathetic diarrhea.
Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.
An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.
Dorfman wakes up disoriented, dizzy, nauseous, depressed, and has diarrhea. As I followed his symptoms in the book it became grotesquely clear to me I had them, too—except for the depression. The saving grace was John Blumenthal's devious comic sensibility. Every time I started feeling depressed along with Dorfman, I came to something that made me laugh. If only poor Dorfman could have read What's Wrong with Dorfman whenever he started sliding into depression maybe he would have laughed like I did, and felt better. But let's get real.
Dorfman's dad was a doctor, a medical doctor. He was such a conscientious doctor he took the blood pressures of Dorfman, Dorfman's sister and their mother several times a day. He admonished the three of them repeatedly, whenever they were in his presence, even as adults, before meals and, in fact, whenever it occurred to him, to wash their hands and to make sure they worked up a good lather with the soap. This reminded me of my own father, who constantly harped about washing hands. The only difference was my father never mentioned the lather part. But then my father wasn't a physician. He never took our blood pressure.
It seemed fairly evident to me, as it's probably seeming evident to you, that Dorfman's father--who did other nutty things, as well, such as following everyone around in his house turning out the lights behind them—that Dorfman's father was the reason for Dorfman's symptoms. That he was neurotic, just as my father was neurotic.
Living with such nuttiness it would be expected of Dorfman to be neurotic, too. Unless the experts have re-defined neurosis, or if in fact there even is such a disorder anymore. For the sake of coherence here, let us say there is indeed such a thing as neurosis. Let us say further it's pretty damned clear Dorfman and his doctor dad were both neurotic nightmares.
I'm not going to give anything away here and confirm or deny that what was wrong with Dorfman was caused by neuroses caused by his nutty father. That would be too easy. Dorfman himself would—and did--scoff at such a notion. He spent tens of thousands of dollars seeing specialists and undergoing every test known to medical science. He sought treatments not recognized by medical science, such as a Chinese “herbal treatment” that might well have been based on dried “cow turds,” and torture prescribed by a chiropractic allergist.
It should come as no huge surprise that Dorfman is a hypochondriac. This means he is ambivalent with test results that turn up nothing frightening, such as cancer or an aneurysm that could kill instantly without a wisp of warning. He's relieved as well as disappointed. His recreational reading consists of “The Big Red Book” of diseases. He commiserates and talks of suicide with a down-on-her-luck actress named Delilah, whom he met in his doctor's waiting room and who suffers symptoms identical to his.
Dorfman, by the way, is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. While he suffers with the uncertainty of his intermittent symptoms—that's another thing, they come and go unpredictably—his screenplay, a comic cop story, is undergoing the horrendous Hollywood sausage grinder committee process that could ruin him for good if it fails, or save his career if it ever becomes a movie.
Yikes, my own neuroses (yes, me too), which I've pretty much maneuvered into dormancy over the years, are giving me flashback pains in the abdomen by my merely recounting what's wrong with Dorfman's life. I must go now before I contract sympathetic diarrhea.
Okay, I can tell you this: What's Wrong with Dorfman has what I would call a happy ending. If it didn't I would not be sitting here writing this report. I'd be reading an outdated magazine in the waiting room at my doctor's office. In other words no matter what is wrong with you, you will find What's Wrong with Dorfman not only safe to read but rather a hoot—so long as you read the whole thing straight through to the end.
An added benefit for me is that I now diligently work up a good lather with the soap when washing my hands. You should, too.
June 10, 2007
No one has reviewed this book? What the helll. 'Twas good and quirky. About a guy (Dorfman). Something is wrong with him. What is it? Dunno.
March 26, 2008
It started out witty clever and just cynical enough to make it interesting. Unfortunately, it was all down hill from there.
September 11, 2013
Great novel with a style similar to Shalom Auslander. Self-depreciation at its best.
December 27, 2015
This was a really funny book that kept my attention. It flowed so well that it was hard to put down. My 2nd book I've read so far by this author, and I hope he writes more.
January 31, 2016
A hilariously heartbreaking story that made me alternately laugh out loud and cry as I read it.
Read
March 30, 2016very funny and highly entertaining
April 23, 2019
This book is pretty good, but I'm not the author, so what do I know?
All seriousness aside, John Blumenthal has written a smart and funny book, with a main character with whom any reader can sympathize and identify.
Martin Dorfman is a down-on-his luck movie screenwriter who hasn't sold a script since Napoleon was a corporal. He wakes up, one morning, with a mysterious ailment for which his doctor is unable to find any cause. After 10s of thousands of dollars spent on x-rays, scans, and diagnostic procedures, Dorfman is no closer to finding out what ails him.
Through flashbacks, we learn of his neurotic, hypochondriac, physician father, from whom, we can see, he has acquired his own traits. To make things worse, the married Dorfman meets Delilah, a kindred spirit with whom he develops a coffee-shop relationship, creating a feedback loop that only serves to feed the beast consuming him from the inside out.
This book is wry, smart, and, at times laugh-out-loud funny. I recommend it highly.
Disclaimer: I was not given a free copy of this book by NetGalley, the publisher, or the author, in exchange for my honest review.
All seriousness aside, John Blumenthal has written a smart and funny book, with a main character with whom any reader can sympathize and identify.
Martin Dorfman is a down-on-his luck movie screenwriter who hasn't sold a script since Napoleon was a corporal. He wakes up, one morning, with a mysterious ailment for which his doctor is unable to find any cause. After 10s of thousands of dollars spent on x-rays, scans, and diagnostic procedures, Dorfman is no closer to finding out what ails him.
Through flashbacks, we learn of his neurotic, hypochondriac, physician father, from whom, we can see, he has acquired his own traits. To make things worse, the married Dorfman meets Delilah, a kindred spirit with whom he develops a coffee-shop relationship, creating a feedback loop that only serves to feed the beast consuming him from the inside out.
This book is wry, smart, and, at times laugh-out-loud funny. I recommend it highly.
Disclaimer: I was not given a free copy of this book by NetGalley, the publisher, or the author, in exchange for my honest review.
December 28, 2018
Mr. Blumenthal achieves what writers of all genera aspire to: visceral empathy from their readers. As the main character attests, everyone's a little bit crazy. Mining this vein of golden certainty, at least one aspect of Dorfman's life will make the reader squirm with a mother lode of precise identification and genuine empathy. For those of us clinically diagnosed with a mental condition, Dorfman becomes our fools gold for his near-enough experience with the real, 24 karat malady which resists duplication.
Recommended for people who can appreciate and perhaps even enjoy neurotic families, Americana, movie industry arcana, Teutonic angst, and new-age medicine, "Dorfman" provides a quick and simple, though temporary, antidote to the crazy world of ours. Consider it literary Prozac/Ritalin/Demerol (though not addictive nor full of harmful side effects!)
Recommended for people who can appreciate and perhaps even enjoy neurotic families, Americana, movie industry arcana, Teutonic angst, and new-age medicine, "Dorfman" provides a quick and simple, though temporary, antidote to the crazy world of ours. Consider it literary Prozac/Ritalin/Demerol (though not addictive nor full of harmful side effects!)
October 13, 2016
October 2016 book for JLMC sustainer book club. I found it amusing in the sense of identifying with a neurotic 40 year old Jewish guy! His writing and storyline reminded me of Woody Allen very dry sense of humor which I enjoy. Also story took place in southern California so I was familiar with the places and I like reading about places I have lived.
July 29, 2011
I laughed out loud at parts of this book! If you have a hypochondriac in the family you will like this book...or not:)
August 14, 2016
I enjoyed this book.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews