Pinch Me was Glendon Swarthout's final novel, published after his death in 1992 by St. Martin's Press. It deals in comic fashion with the real estate collapse of 1990-91 in his home town of Scottsdale, Arizona, where Glendon lived for over 30 years and also satirized in another comic novel, The Cadillac Cowboys. Prescient to a fault, Swarthout's Pinch Me is even more timely today in the midst of the greatest real estate Depression and property value collapse in Phoenix's history. What better remedy to deal with America's financial trauma than comedy? Laughing through our tears.
Don Chambers is a dogged realtor in love. When fellow realtor Jenny Staley says she can't leave her ninety-one-year-old rifle-toting granny and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Don invites them all to move into his nearby Scottsdale condo. But Grandma Windy won't budge. Both these wannabe lovers are middle-aged, divorced adults, and there is no reason they can't consummate their passion. They are on the verge of just that sexual act when the phone call comes in from Don's 83-year-old father. Harry has just broken his hip and Don must transport him from Michigan to Don's Arizona home. When eventually the stingy old codger moves out of Don's condo and Don and Jenny are once more alone, who should arrive but Don's son Ron, a recent college dropout with a pet rabbit and a tank of oxygen to which he turns when life becomes too stressful, as it so often does.
Complications multiply, and through it all the hapless pair of wannabe lovers stumble aong, their eyes on a simple goal --marriage and release from the demands of being the filling in a generational sandwich of older parents and younger children. What nuttiness transpires in this true-to-life melodrama spiced by this famous author's dry wit, the journey is a wonderfully enjoyable one for the reader.
Pinch Me is a comedy of good manners and bad relations, reflected by a quote from a noted behavorial scientist in a New York Times article on how increased lifespans are changing family life. "I estimate that half the 35-year-olds today will have a dependent parent alive for at least 20 years before that parent dies," said gerontologist Vern Bengtson. "Having aging and dependent parents at the same time as caring for your own children and grandchildren will be the major domestic crisis for the 21st century."
Pinch Me should definitely be made into a low-budget contemporary comic romance movie, for it reads like an American version of the surprise British hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, although in this case the comic emphasis is on the funerals! Certainly all the generational elements are in this funny tale for a spin-off TV situation comedy as well.
