Three Dashes Bitters

When Tim Schmidt returns to New Orleans to attend his sister's debutante ball, he finds that nothing has changed during his three-year hiatus in the orderly sanctuary of Boston.

He is still in love with Jane, a hard-drinking iconoclast, too well bred to join the ranks of the Generation X slackers, yet unable to accept the standards of her high society upbringing. Happily, it seems Jane might still harbor feelings for him.

But over drinks at The Columns Hotel, things get messy, and Tim's grand return to the city of his birth soon unravels-the very sort of thing that inspired Tim to leave NOLA in the first place.

With only twenty-four hours to figure out what to do (which has never been Tim's forte), this former philosophy student finds unsolicited advice from members of a new leisure class. There is Milton, Tim's college roommate turned Marxist revolutionary, a Falstaffian gent bent on overthrowing the government. Two young Arizona "brothers from another mother." A disillusioned German exchange student who has abandoned the study of physics for the French Quarter social scene. And an Italian fellow who is a self-proclaimed master in the art of amore.

Picking up were Walker Percy (The Moviegoer) and John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces) left off, this wild romp presents New Orleans as an eternal city, whose characters exceed the vicissitudes of fortune, functioning instead as a universal canvas upon which individuals must struggle to carve out their existence. This is not the NOLA of Hurricane Katrina, political corruption, crime, tourism, or the home of jazz. Rather, Simmons adds to the literary oeuvre of this Southern city, and Three Dashes Bitters captures a New Orleans defined only in the individuals we encounter-not the easy stereotypes that make individuality impossible.

"Jack Simmons' wild romantic comedy, Three Dashes Bitters, showcases a cast of colorful characters spouting cheeky dialogue amid the alcohol-numbed drift and sustained adolescence of graduate students headed nowhere near a degree. Set against the backdrop of affluent uptowners who belong to the New Orleans Country Club and are forever off to another debutante ball, this kinetic story recalls the bacchanal of On the Road, if staged as a twisting Grand Prix over the Big Easy's potholed streets. Simmons' novel features hard drinking and fuzzy thinking and a destination as dizzy as it is pleasing."

-Fredrick Barton, author of In the Wake of the Flagship and The El Cholo Feeling Passes