Wherefore art they Karen?

The intriguing if gimmicky premise behind Peter Lefcourt’s cocky sixth novel is a Bildungsroman structured around a chronicle of 11 former loves who all happened to be named Karen. Lefcourt’s hero is a fledgling writer referred to as “L--” who consults a statistician friend on the odds against such “chronic Karenphilia.” “The first thing he wanted to know, naturally, was the size of the statistical sample.” L-- coyly confesses, “It is a modest (though not insignificant) number -- a number, let’s just say, that would fall somewhere between Wilt Chamberlain’s number and St. Paul’s number.” The odds turn out to be 29,976 to 1 against, as improbable as “being hit by a foul ball off the bat of a left-handed pinch-hitter in the sixth inning of three different baseball games in three different stadiums within a five-month period.”

Starting with Karen Shrummer in 1956, with whom he’s roped into a solemn mock marriage in a fifth-grade classmate’s garage, Lefcourt’s narrator regales us with his dual struggles making it as a writer and making it with women named Karen. The result, an amused and even fond look back at an essentially unhealthy pattern of behavior, is pruriently entertaining. Unfortunately, however, the relentlessness of L--’s spectacularly bad instincts with women fails to sustain the exuberance of the novel’s opening pages.

In the late 1970s, after perambulations in Rome and Quebec, our hero finds himself back in his birthplace, New York City, trying to support himself by writing and editing pornographic books which require sex “once every chapter, and always in a different manner.”

“Eleven Karens” makes that quota. In fact, the variety of Karens gives us the feeling he’s ticking off items on a checklist. There’s Polish Karen Szbachevsky, daughter of a stereotypically overprotective stevedore father, with whom L-- reaches third base in 10th grade; anthropologist Karen Myers, whom he meets at a nudist camp where he waits tables during a college summer; and Italian almost-Karen Cara Boleri, who teaches him that sex is not “some sort of combination of track meet and hunt.” While teaching English at a fancy Manhattan private girls’ school in 1969 to avoid being sent to Vietnam, he’s seduced by underage Karen --, whose last name he withholds for fear of being prosecuted under the Mann Act.

Still trying to escape the draft, L-- joins the Peace Corps, and in Togo, he meets hard-driving Nigerian businesswoman Karen Ogbomosho. Back in New York City, driving a taxi to support his novel writing, one of his fares is a suicidal, blind poet named Karen Mendoza who’s obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Anna Karenina. Rounding out the collection are lesbian Karen Levesque in Quebec, who wants him for his sperm; Karen IX, a vicious Scrabble player who earns her living showering onstage at a nightclub; crazy Blanche du Bois-wannabe Karen Kraft, who lives next door to him in Los Angeles, where he’s trying to write screenplays; and finally, adulterous Karen “Jones,” whom he picks up at a museum in Paris.

Lefcourt is a successful television and film writer whose credits include the Emmy-winning “Cagney and Lacey.” He’s no stranger to glib humor or the exigencies of snappy plots. This running testament to “the mortality of love” and the women who left their “fingerprints on my heart” is a series of loosely connected but well-structured, self-contained stories. Lefcourt’s tone is a flip mix of self-deprecating humor and swaggering. His narrator is a guy who just can’t say no -- what, and insult the lady? -- or accept no for an answer. The result occasionally recalls Paul Theroux’s amorous autobiography, “My Secret History,” though “Eleven Karens” is more of a slapstick, comic shtick pastiche.

The most reliably funny features of the novel are Lefcourt’s cryptic footnotes, which provide a hilarious counterpoint and running commentary to his saga. St. Paul, for example, is defined as “Greek erotophobe and apostle, whose idea of a good time was a donkey ride to Damascus.”

Cleverness notwithstanding, the parade of Karens becomes depressing. The narrator and his Karens copulate, but there’s rarely any real connection. Several never show any joy, even in the sack. Lefcourt’s hero isn’t always a cad, but a couple of serious relationships thrown into the mix, even hints of deeper affairs with non-Karens, might have elevated the book beyond the mentality of base-running sex. Despite the exotic locales and range of types, there’s a sameness to the routine: Boy meets girl. Girl turns out to be named Karen. Boy gets girl. Boy leaves girl satiated and asleep. But boy does show a modicum of good taste: He repeatedly pleads amnesia when it comes to describing the actual sexual act.