Sweet Smell's denouement is characteristically unpredictable, the perfect cap to this little quickie. If you're an inveterate Self fan, you'll find his latest offering to be an irresistibly diabolic romp through the funhouse of one man's sexual subconscious. The Kid like the sword of Damocles. Even for someone who makes a living writing an insouciant syndicated sex column, Savage has a lot of answers to cough up. As it turns out, Savage and his boyfriend, Terry, aren't motivated by gestational envy but by misgivings about the usual grim possibilities of a gay future coupled with egregious vanity.
Savage goes on to cite more questionable motivations.
One day I will be hugely fat. . . . His brutally mercenary admission that the adoption provided a convenient topic for his book is the sort of overcooked honesty for which you're grateful on the surface, but doesn't improve your opinion of the truth-teller. The basic idea of such an arrangement is that the child remains in touch with the biological mother while residing with the adoptive parents. He walks us through the legal issues, the paperwork, and the waiting, but makes this sometimes tedious affair seem like fun by weaving in witty personal anecdotes and scenes of local color. The payoff, in more than one way, arrives in the form of a girl named Melissa.