Author Richard Kalich offers here a singularly unique, comic and outlandish Everyman. A Looney-tune figure of the American manchild who, in his episodic adventures through life, loses his penis, is completely dismembered, suffocated, starved and cut in half, yet continues to come back for more. Akin to other great American icons such as Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Ring Lardner's Al and Forrest Gump, Charlie P plumbs the relation between fantasy and reality to offer readers a character both asocial and alienated and, at the same time, at the heart of the American dream.