People Are Funny
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 across the country in Beauport, a tourist town on the New England coast, resides Julie Fiske, David’s ex-wife from thirty years ago. Their marriage was brief, ending after the gay revelation and the death of their baby. Her second husband, Henry, has abandoned her for a younger woman, but he wants to sell their huge Victorian house, which Julie has been running as an AirBnB to make ends meet. She wants her sullen seventeen-year-old daughter Mandy to get serious about applying to colleges. Mandy, rummaging in the basement, finds old boxes with material indicating that her mother had been previously married. She convinces Julie to e-mail David and renew their connection as best friends. To escape his own problems, David flies across country to spend his summer vacation with Julie and Mandy, resolving to help them put their lives back together.

            Few read McCauley for his plots, and the main male character is usually a literary stand-in for himself, allowing him to pontificate on current pressing topics. McCauley’s specialty is his memorable supporting characters, such as the alcoholic Sandra, an online expert on maximizing your AirBnB rentals who has an obsession with throw pillows; Julie’s sultry neighbor Amira, good-naturedly seducing any attractive guy despite marriage to her rich, older husband; and Kenneth, a bossy, hyper-capable, perhaps duplicitous antique store owner romantically interested in David, among others. McCauley’s forte is to describe these characters in just a few sentences of dialog as we become entranced by their eccentric qualities.

            Another of McCauley’s techniques is to allow characters to say outlandish things out loud that we might be thinking but would never have the nerve to utter. He focuses on the complexities and pitfalls of both gay and straight relationships. Here’s a brief taste of his bon mots and barbs: “All couples start off as Romeo and Juliet and end up as Laurel and Hardy.” “She and her husband were wine connoisseurs, which is to say, incipient alcoholics with money.” “She took superb care of herself but she had the hard face of someone who could stand to eat a cupcake once or twice a year.” It’s no exaggeration to say there is a chuckle on almost every page.

            My Ex-Life is a meditation on second chances inspired by midlife melancholy as a person reassesses past decisions and earlier goals. While McCauley is ostensibly satirizing many modern social conventions, in the end he endorses the traditional values of home, family, and especially friendship. He delivers his medicine with warmth, whether he’s skewering college application essays or live porn websites. In this age of fake news and alternative facts, hearing the unvarnished truth about our daily eccentricities and inconsistencies seems refreshingly radical. His characters grow in ways they often don’t realize as they journey in fits and stumble toward a fresh start that they didn’t even know they needed. McCauley is an artful observer of the human condition, implicitly suggesting that despite our mistakes, we need to persevere and figure out how to get along with other people—a fitting message for our partisan era.

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Brian Bromberger is a freelance writer who works as a staff reporter and arts critic forThe Bay Area Reporter.