In a wry take on the male midlife crisis, a Hollywood lawyer spends a weekend reenacting the Battle of Gettysburg with a Playboy Playmate, to the consternation of family and friends.

John Reynolds Stanhope, age 47, was named after the Civil War general instrumental at Gettysburg, grew up near the battlefield, and worked as a guide there. Now he’s a successful Hollywood lawyer, agent, manager, and producer, but he’s also flabby and has insomnia, and his pilot about sleep just got rejected by A&E. So he has secretly planned a weekend playing his namesake with Gettysburg reenactors at a sports field north of Malibu. Then stuff happens—and through it all, Morris (All Joe Knight, 2016, etc.), a Hollywood lawyer and producer himself, cracks wise on Tinseltown with an insider’s glee. Reynolds gets drunk while discussing a reality TV project with a former Playmate and a one-time Miss Universe and decides to bring them to the battle. His wife, a top-notch movie producer, uses an app to discover he lied about his weekend golf plans and pursues him, eventually asking their daughter and her friend to meet her there. Reynolds’ lunch companions invite their sons. The worried wife also asks for help from her husband’s longtime client, a character based on Norman Lear, who brings along an actor suggesting Tom Cruise without Scientology. While the solo weekend gets as crowded as the Marx Brothers’ stateroom scene, Reynolds navigates battlefield skirmishes, existential questions, and awkward interactions with his wife and daughter. Morris gives him some fine speeches about history and war. But amid all the comic material, the hero’s quasi-crisis—a “feeling that nothing [is] worth half a try”—may just be the biggest shell among the hail of potshots at Hollywood culture.

A well-written work that some readers may find entertains more than it engages.

With his marriage over and his business affairs gone murky, the narrator of this uneven debut has only the memory of his glory days on the basketball court as a youth.

In a story that bounces around like an errant foul shot, Joe Knight delivers alternating sections about life in the 1970s as a teen formed by TV, basketball, and music and as an adult adrift. There are recurring interludes on William Penn, the early history of Philadelphia, where the story is set, and brick-making as well as repeated references to Walt Whitman and the Band. “I might be scattered, but that’s okay,” Joe says early on. For a time he focuses on basketball, and fans of the sport will enjoy what Morris (White Man’s Problems, 2014) calls “the perfect harmonic convergence” of good players melding into a great high school team. The sections on Joe’s rise after college from negligible jobs to founding an ad firm that quickly gets hot and leads to an eight-figure buyout hum along at a snappy pace. All is not blue sky, though. As a boy, Joe witnessed something in a church that he holds secret for years. The wealthy adult sours on marriage, and divorce finds him compulsively bedding strippers (the sex scenes aren’t subtle). A self-loathing loner, Joe seems to have left any joy in life on the hardwood courts of high school. When a former teammate tips him to a criminal probe into the buyout, the trouble threatens to entangle the friends of his youth (and the payoff may even help explain those recurring references). The tension surrounding the investigation and legal matters is well-handled, a credit perhaps to the author’s day job as an entertainment lawyer.

A dark and busy rise-and-fall tale, the book doesn’t gel quite as well its young hoopsters.

Life undermines the pursuit of success and status in these rich, bewildering stories.

True to the title, the heroes of Morris’ first volume of fiction try to figure out the conundrums of love, career and family at every stage of the white male life cycle: A wiseass teenager stages a gross prank to catch the eye of a pretty cheerleader; a newly minted lawyer discovers that laziness and disaffection are no bar to advancement at his firm; an old man tries to forge a new connection to his dementia-stricken wife with the help of a pint-sized pianist. Most of the protagonists are professionals living in New York or LA who have their comfortable-to-affluent middle-aged lives shaken up by subtle instabilities. A rich producer shares a secret tragedy with a Mexican repairman; an investment banker is baffled by the technological universe he is supposed to have mastered; a funeral takes an Ivy League grad back to his working-class Irish Catholic roots; a hack attorney relaxes by posing as a crazy homeless man; and in the bleakly comic title story, a man reluctantly chaperoning his son’s fifth-grade class on a Virginia field trip has his own callowness contrasted with the august figures of American history. Morris, an entertainment lawyer, producer and journalist, knows his characters and their worlds like the back of his hand. He endows them with both a sharply etched particularity and an iconic heft: “Jim Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack.” His wonderfully evocative prose finds a world in tiny details of gesture and setting, in the casually arrogant stirring of coffee or the drab décor of a hotel room “conceived in mediocrity.” The result is a cleareyed, finely wrought and mordantly funny take on a modern predicament by a new writer with loads of talent.

A superb literary gallery of men who can’t understand why life has given them what they want.