SIMON IS IN HOG HEAVEN. . . ISNT HE? A fifty-three-year-old architect with a "tragic sense of brick," Simon takes a years sabbatical from his job and his marriage and moves to New York. The apartment he sublets is spacious and empty, so when he meets three gorgeous lingerie models -- half his age and a little down on their luck -- at a Lexington Avenue bar, it seems perfectly natural to invite them to move in. The situation, they point out, "has the structure of a male fantasy." Simons houseguests prove to be surprisingly perceptive and intelligent, but they are each a little lost, struggling to find their way in that difficult city. Simon, by turns doting and inattentive, tempted and horrified, offers them his skewed philosophies of life and love. Privately, he mourns his age, his stalled career, his diminishing sexual prowess, and the inevitable day when the women will leave him.

In the quirky, inimitable style that has always characterized Donald Barthelmes work, Paradise is a bawdy, optimistic, and provocative tale of lives meshing in a quixotic world. "A wry meditation, comic and melancholy. . . A charming book" -- Newsweek "Paradise is Barthelmes sunniest, mellowest and most entertaining book. He has fixed his eye on the aging, urban man and liberated woman, noted their frailties, the dreadful chaos of their lives, and smiled." -- People