A Review of The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, by Jon-Jon Goulian

Pity poor Jon-Jon Goulian, who had to endure growing up in sunny La Jolla, California in a loving upper-middle-class family of doctors and lawyers and spend his summers surfing the Pacific and attending Andover Summer School. The mercifully brief orgy of media coverage that followed closely on the heels of the release of Goulian’s sometimes touching but unfortunately shallow memoir emphasized that the author is friends with all the right people in the New York literocracy; that he is blessed with a powerful and persuasive agent and that he received a whopping $750,000 advance for this, his neophyte literary effort. Strangely enough, not much attention was paid to the writing itself.

So what of this much-touted debut? Related in a breezy, chatty first-person narration, it chronicles the author’s formative years up through the end of college and his early professional life in New York, where he spent a lot of time doing not much of anything, although friends tell me that he was a much-loved and extremely competent assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books. Goulian would like the reader to commiserate with him, for example, because he only scored a 650 on his Math SAT II rather than 800 like his older brother; that he is prone to bouts of alienation bordering on depression (most of us are, no??) and that he had to attend Columbia instead of Yale and Harvard like his older brothers at a time (1985) when movies like Escape from New York testified to the city’s rather frightening atmosphere (I grew up in New York in the 80’s: it wasn’t that bad).

Certainly, trying to live up to unrealistic expectations and being gender confused as a teen can produce anxiety and much pressure on even the strongest willed among us, but in Goulian’s case, it’s all a bit much to swallow: his parents never berate or punish him — they seem remarkably understanding, all told, as do his classmates when he shows up to his prom as Eric the Red in drag. Sexuality looms large here, and although Goulian at least twice in his teen years reached orgasm with other boys, he claims to be a plain old heterosexual who likes to wear women’s clothing. In 2011 a boy who dresses like a girl — even when he looks something like a cross between Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter and Cher — is certainly interesting, but is not exactly front-page news.

The most surprising thing is that being half-Jewish and half-Armenian, Goulian wasn’t hauled off to a see a psychiatrist the second time he tried to file away his nose through plastic surgery. In pictures of him as a teen that pepper the book, it is sad to see just how handsome Goulian was before his operations — he still cuts quite a handsome figure, that said. Maybe if someone had given him a Laura Nyro album (see, big noses are beautiful too, for Pete’s sake), he might have spared himself these unnecessary and painful procedures. Two hundred pages into Goulian’s account of hernias mistaken for third testicles, of girls with unshaven pits trying to de-virginize him as he fumbles with condoms in dark dorm rooms and parking lots, and jack-off sessions with thick-membered boys named Gunnar, the reader starts to lose interest in Goulian and his adolescent prattle.

Goulian’s affection for his grandmother Shamiram — Shammy for short — is particularly touching, but even his treatment of his Armenian roots is maddening: would it be too much to ask that he know, for example, that his own last name is, in fact, Turkish for rose (gül) and not Armenian (vart, which gives us Vartian, not Goulian)? The most interesting parts of The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, in fact, are descriptions of Goulian’s maternal grandfather, the famed political philosopher Sidney Hook.

Goulian is truly funny at times. He is also not entirely lacking in literary talent, and he has a good sense of story arc and structure, which makes this narcissistic tome all the more frustrating. I am pretty sure that if he ever sits down again to write a more layered work some day, it may, in fact, be well worth reading.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt by Jon-Jon Goulian is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.