This wryly comic tale follows the lives of a stunted antihero and his long-suffering girlfriend

The title character of American author Kate Greathead’s second novel is not just a man; he’s an archetype, a quintessence, a lament in human form. Though decent at heart, George is self-absorbed, inattentive, forgetful, clumsy, indecisive and workshy. A philosophy graduate with vague literary ambitions that never quite come to fruition, he gets by on his good looks and family connections. By contrast, his longsuffering girlfriend, Jenny, is competent and conscientious. The story of their interminable, codependent relationship is told in a wry, third-person narrative foregrounding her plight: George’s laziness “felt like a specific kind of male arrogance … in the beginning, before she knew what to make of it, she had found it charming”; “His absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him. It was immature, it was selfish. It was not a good way to be!”

Set in the US during the first two decades of the 21st century, the novel follows George from his adolescence to his 30s, as he lurches from one mildly amusing calamity to the next. After being briefly hospitalised after a panic attack, he is so affronted by the resulting medical bill that he punches a wall in anger, breaking his wrist and necessitating a further hospitalisation. When he earns an unexpected windfall by starring in a TV commercial, he contrives to squander the money on ill-advised cryptocurrency investments. Out on the town, he can’t find his wallet and is sure it’s been swiped, only to later realise he’d left it on his bed at home.

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In frank and hilarious style, the author recounts the significant encounters that helped make him who he is

In this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds. Sex, White writes, with the nonchalant wisdom that runs throughout this book, is “a language one speaks” that is both “communal and isolating”. Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s” to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’”.

White begins the memoir by confessing that, despite having “a small penis”, he has been “stung” by sexual desire since the age of 10. This early moment of authorial undress is a typical piece of self-satire, part of his puckish compulsion to make himself the butt of the joke. It is, he admits in one of many sharp asides about the mechanics of life writing, an auto-fictive sleight-of-hand, an act of “literary daredevilry” which here makes him a consistently endearing, amiable narrator. The book’s funniest moments arise in dialogue that White has himself speak as a delightfully dry and “curiously wise” adolescent. In one scene, he gauges the receptiveness of an apparently straight potential lover by inventing a tall tale about a promiscuous queer schoolmate. Noticing that his audience has become aroused, he announces: “Well it’s me. I’m the cocksucker.”

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Lovely documentary records the battle to protect a stretch of the polluted river and the beautiful bathing site it is defending

‘I’m just giving my poo a kiss before I go,” says Lindsey Cole, as she launches in the water to swim the Bristol channel wearing a mermaid tail. Cole is an environmental activist, and the poo is a giant inflatable with a cheery smiley face. It bobs along behind her as she swims to raise awareness of raw sewage polluting local rivers. Six hours in, and Cole is fed up: “It’s so boring!” she wails. And yet campaigning never looked so fun and friendly as it does in this joyous documentary about Bristol’s clean water campaigners.

Not far from the city centre, at a dreamily lush section of the Avon, a formidable female-led group of wild swimmers is fighting for official bathing status for a section of the river at Conham Park. They collect samples of the river water and share sewage data with others swimmers (so no one has to wait for their stomachs to alert them to E coli). If Conham Park has designated bathing status, the Environment Agency would have to test the water and – crucially – investigate the source of any pollution. There’s a depressing meeting with a man from Wessex Water who explains that neither the water company nor the agency has “an aspiration” to make the river clean enough to swim in.

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Over a four-decade career, the Franco-Haitian artist has built his own world of contrasts, contradictions and blissful escape

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The next three nights are going to be terrifically tense with Claudia Winkleman. Plus: a corpse walks out of a morgue in Patience. Here’s watch to watch this evening

9pm, Wednesday, BBC One

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Author will highlight the ‘enormous disadvantage’ handed to children without access to books, and call on government to improve early-years literacy

Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children”.

The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak.

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Utterly preposterous and brilliant fun, Leo Woodall’s turn as a maths genius hunted by shadowy forces is glorious, confident escapism. It’s as enjoyable as it is ludicrous

Prime Target is one of those endeavours that gives you the inescapable feeling that someone came up with the title first and worked backwards from there.

Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall) is a brilliant young postgrad mathematician at Cambridge. We know he is brilliant because various maths professors keep saying that his is the best mind they have come across in 30 years of teaching. He works into the night, frantically scribbling in real notebooks with real pencils (“Computers aren’t fast enough”), even when there is sex on offer from hot barmen or young women yearning for him to come to their birthday parties and fall in love with them. And we know we’re in Cambridge because everywhere is covered in ivy outside with antique brass instruments and oak panelling inside. Everyone is in layers of brown cord and tweed. They look like very large, very clever sparrows.

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The way this documentary locks people in rooms with their greatest terror until they’re gibbering wrecks is like an awful reality show. Should we really be gawping at them?

What are you irrationally scared of? What is the thing that, if you see it, means there is likely to be a you-shaped hole in the nearest wall as you flee in panic? For me, it is stray hairs – anywhere, though in the bath or shower is worst. I could throw up just thinking about it. I would also kill a clown as soon as look at one, but I don’t consider that a phobia. It is a well-grounded, sensible protective instinct because clowns are clearly wrong on every level.

We are all, I suspect, scared of, repulsed by, or rendered incoherent with disgust about something that others approach with perfect equanimity. However sensible you are, however sanguine and reasonable, it seems a part of every human brain cannot be content without sabotaging your smooth passage through life. The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia, a series somewhere between a documentary and a reality show, is set in a facility in Amsterdam that treats phobics of all stripes with a revolutionary treatment that boasts a 90% success rate. I bet it’s the coulrophobics who resist. Because we don’t want to die!

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Film-maker known for provocative works Les Valseuses and Tenue de Soirée died at home in Paris on Monday

Bertrand Blier, the French film director with a long history of provocative offerings including Les Valseuses (Going Places), Tenue de Soirée (Evening Dress) and Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful for You), has died aged 85. His son, Leonard, told AFP that the film-maker “died peacefully at home Monday night in Paris, surrounded by his wife and children”.

Blier achieved his greatest successes in the 70s and 80s with a series of outrage-baiting films, many featuring Gérard Depardieu, which concentrated on exposing wounded male machismo. In 2011 he told the Guardian : “I’ve always enjoyed shocking the bourgeois. I know I make buddy movies, but what intrigues me again and again is how male friendships are relatively unproblematic, and yet when men approach what they passionately desire, then their problems begin.”

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