The week before an important philosophy conference, Kenneth is struggling to finish both the last chapter of his book and the paper he's writing for the event. His efforts are thwarted by a leaky faucet—and his life as a whole is turned upside down by the plumber who shows up to fix it.
I took philosophy in college. And I sucked at it. I still find it fascinating even though it is not my forte. Still, I'm not a quitter and the Plato wasn't going to scare me away from buttsex or manlove.
Crude confession: there is a video on a certain website that contains a plumber and a whole lotta... plumbing going on. They plumb each other. Twice. It is AMAZING. I had high hopes this story would veer in that direction.
Sadly, there was no buttsex to be had and a close approximation of instalove that I couldn't make heads or tails out of.
Ken is a tenured philosophy professor who's apparently lost his joie de vivre after surrendering his dreams of becoming an erotica writer. And he has a leaky sink. He calls in plumber Mark to fix said leakage and they spend the day together. I understand being hot for someone on sight, but I don't know why Ken is so besotted immediately. Is it the tool belt? The uniform? The way he looks? smells? I need some context. You have sell it to me if you're selling me instalove.
They talk and Mark's no slouch in the philosophy department; he can hold his own, but this trope of meeting someone, feeling a connection and then planning vacations all within the span of 24 hrs doesn't jive for me. I need some atmosphere, some nuance, something. That just didn't happen.
The writing is interwoven with some lovely philosophical sentiments on love and life that were enjoyable. It does have tendency to be quite tangential and those tangents are squirrely. That page time would've been better spent showing me some relationship progression.
"Love is not a god at all," Plato wrote, "but is rather a spirit that mediates between people and the objects of their desire. Love is neither wise nor beautiful, but is rather the desire for wisdom and beauty."
Aside from the philosophical lessons, though, there wasn't much I could sink my teeth into. The characters are bland. The story is a slice of life that didn't have much substance to it, and most importantly, there was fade to black sex! An egregious offense.
An ARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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