Sex comedy

Although he made his reputation as a novelist, Graham Greene published dozens of short stories during his long writing career, including a 1967 collection called May We Borrow Your Husband? & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life.

Greene liked to categorize his work, as evidenced by the way he labeled some of his novels as entertainments to set them apart from his more serious work. Calling these stories comedies does much the same thing. He seemed to want to state before the critics could that his work was a bit of fluff, as if something entertaining or amusing could not also be artful.

"Two Gentle People," the last story in this book and one of the best ones, shows us a man and woman, each married unhappily to someone else, who meet in a park, make a connection and spend much of the day together before returning, unfaithful only in their hearts, to their spouses.

More obviously comic, though still a quality story, is "The Root of All Evil," in which a group of men meet secretly so that another man won't interfere with their drinking. Secrecy here is the root of all evil, leading to a series of hilarious misadventures.

In the title story, an attractive young couple honeymoons in Antibes, where an older writer (who seems a lot like Graham Greene himself) observes over a series of days while two men plot carefully to seduce ... the husband. As the husband shows surprisingly little interest in his beautiful bride, the seduction is all too easy.

"The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen" finds a young couple dining in a restaurant next to a table of eight Japanese men. The young woman has just been given an advance for a novel she is writing. While the young man wants only to marry her, she speaks endlessly of her bright future as a writer because of her powerful observation skills, while failing to even notice those eight Japanese gentlemen.

Despite the subtitle, there really isn't that much sex in these stories, but there is most blatantly in "Cheap in August." This is about a bored wife vacationing alone in Jamaica because it's "cheap in August." She sees this as her opportunity for a brief romantic affair, but the only man she can attract is a fat older fellow whose one attractive quality is that he is not her husband.

These are the best of the 12 stories in the book, but the others too keep the reader entertained.