“Starting Over; or, Before the Collapse of the State; or, Penny and Payne: Competing Mythic Hypotheses as to the Origins Thereof” is the second chapter of The Suitors, an audacious reimagining of The Odyssey, in which Penny waits alone at home while Payne, a modern-day Odysseus, gallivants around the world on battleships and attack helicopters, waging wars of conquest. A drinking, drugging crew of ne’er-do-well squatters surrounds Penny, eager for her attention. Even their most eyebrow-raising exploits can’t distract her, though, as she angrily pines for Payne. But when a mysterious man with suspicious origins arrives on the scene, the suitors’ precarious pecking order falls to pieces in the glow of Penny’s newly ignited ardor. Brutal, playful, sexy, and subversive, The Suitors is a classic of its own kind. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Ehrenreich blends Tom Robbins’ sly humor with Steve Erickson’s bubbling sense of the subconscious and Voltaire’s irreverent twists of plot. The New York Times raved, “Ehrenreich writes with an ease and pure line-by-line skill that’s rare.” And Bomb magazine called The Suitors, “truly a ravishing book.”
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