Other Lives, Places - Part 5: Keeping up with the Zeitgeist

In Viagra Blues, Part 5 of Other Lives, Other Places, Freddy's second marriage collapses under the combined weight of desire, aging and disillusionment. What once passed for passion turns brittle, then breaks. Left to himself, he drifts through a string of late-life affairs - comic, hopeful and faintly absurd - buoyed by chemistry, vanity and the small blue aids of modern science. Each new beginning promises renewal, each repeats the same quiet - and not so quiet - failure. The search for Arcadia persists, but in increasingly improbable forms, ending in a final liaison that is at once logical and grotesque: a love affair with a robot. Darkly humorous and unsparing, Viagra Blues charts the afterlife of desire in a world where even love has become a technological workaround.