Sitting Pretty

by Al Young

Loquacious ne'er-do-well and opinionated drifter Sidney J. Prettymoon, meanders around San Francisco, surviving on part-time jobs and easy-touch friends, managing touch relationships with various women, including his ex-wife, and ruminating on the attractions and shortcomings of modern life

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Dewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

SITTING PRETTY was Al Young’s third novel, published in 1976 when the author was 37, so that Sidney J. Prettymon—his 56 year old narrator and conscience figure seems more a reach than a self-projection. Prettymon, aka Sit, seems more failed in his Berkeley setting than “sitting petty.” He is divorced from a woman whom he still loves and who is suffering from cancer, is unemployed, and estranged from two children who seem more respectable and successful than he. However, he keeps heart, has friends and continually philosophizes about himself, society and others’ choices, both face to face and as a regular on a call-in radio show. Here he riffs on “anything that’s funny”: “Everybody got they own angle on what it is about it that’s really comical or ridiculous. Now, me myself, I’m all the time flashin on the whole idea of it bein a world out there, outside my head, crowded with with fools and rascals like me who be bumblin they way thru life from crib to casket, ain’t got the slightest idea what it’s spose to be about.” Like Twain’s Huck Finn, Prettymon’s our filter against jive. Young’s stylistic register, like Twain’s, is as supple and free as jazz. And Young’s takes on class, race, body, soul, and change itself, even after 42 years—post revolutions, post internet, post 9/11, and post Obama and Trump—still keep their edge.

[Beautiful_Bibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reads like a diary, but much much better.

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

well writtrn book