Social Blunders Author:Tim Sandlin Some consider it a social blunder to use the wrong fork, but Sam Callahan, the narrator of this ribald and tangled yarn, would never make such a mundane faux pas. For Sam, every goof is a doozy, and his missteps are at least as comic and bawdy as they are tragic. — Sandlin provides his bumbling hero with an appropriately quirky past: it's 1984, S... more »am is 33 and his second wife has just left him. He lives in North Carolina with his 19-year-old daughter, born to him and an eighth-grade classmate. (The earlier parts of Sam's life were chronicled in Skipped Parts and Sorrow Floats.) Sam never knew his birth father's identity: his mother claims to have been gang-raped by five high-school football players, which has left Sam with an abhorrence of men and of conventional sex as well.
The impending divorce puts Sam in a mind to get his life together, so he spontaneously introduces himself to four out of five of his possible dads (and--big oops--to the unsuspecting widow of the fifth). He fails to consider the repercussions this will have in the men's families; he's attacked by two of his possible half-brothers, seduced by his could-be stepmother and charmed by his potential half-sister.« less