Jason Strider is a twentysomething young man in the city, with an English degree from an Ivy League university, a very small apartment in the West Village, a vapid job as a receptionist at a casting agency—and no particular idea what to do with his life. On most evenings, Jason gets stoned and goes out, sometimes with his party-hearty school chum Tina and sometimes alone in the immemorial male quest to get laid or, if not, get hammered enough to really regret it the next day and be late for work.

Then one night Jason has athletic, appliance-assisted intercourse with a cute girl named Jane—and ends up lending her his Dickies jeans. Many, many e-mails and text messages later, he is unable to reconnect with her and is reduced to the plaint “I just want my pants back.” How he does, in a most unexpected way, find those pants, and how maturity and mortality come to enter his slacker’s existence, form the matter of this smart, raunchily comic, and finally affecting first novel.