Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Warren Spooner is a sad sack. His mother despises him as the surviving twin from a hideously painful delivery. He's not very smart, and his one redeeming talent--baseball--is nullified by catastrophic injury. He gets into trouble, a lot. Though he manages to organize his life through marriage and a (terrible) job, the self-destructive behavior endures. Fortunately, Pete Dexter--winner of the National Book Award for Paris Trout--provides a calming figure in his step-father, Calmer Ottosson, a man with his own life of promise and disappointment, as well as inexhaustible patience for his wayward ward. Plot's not Dexter's focus--the story ambles through a series of monstrous vignettes projected through unblinking eyes, to the point where the awfulness becomes hilarious and absurd (e.g. a burial at sea gone horribly wrong, complete with erotic misunderstandings). It's like reading Garrison Keillor through a glass of blood: relentlessly dark, yet ultimately affirming. --Jon Foro
About the Author:
Pete Dexter began his working life with a U.S. Post office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He wasn't very good at mail and quit, then caught on as a newspaper reporter in Florida, which he was not very good at, got married, and was not very good at that. In Philadelphia he became a newspaper columnist, which he was pretty good at, and got divorced, which you would have to say he was good at because it only cost $300.
Dexter remarried, won the National Book Award and built a house in the desert so remote that there is no postal service. He's out there six months a year, pecking away at the typewriter, living proof of the adage What goes around comes around--that is, you quit the post office, pal, and the post office quits you.
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