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Summary
Summary
A riotous and dazzling comic story of resilience and love, from the author of the US National Book Award winner, Paris Trout.
Author Notes
Novelist, journalist, and poet Pete Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1943. As a student at the University of South Dakota, where he attended on and off for ten years, he wrote poetry and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. After graduating in 1970, he found work as a newspaper reporter. While working as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was nearly beaten to death by readers who disapproved of a piece he wrote about a drug-related murder. That experience helped propel him into fiction writing, and in 1984, he published God's Pocket.
Dexter won a National Book Award in 1988 for his novel Paris Trout, a book that exemplifies his characteristic blending of humor and violence. As a journalist, his work has also appeared in such periodicals as Esquire and Playboy. Paper Trails, published in 2007, is a compilation of columns he wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News and The Sacramento Bee from the 1970s to the 1990s. He also wrote the novel Spooner in 2009.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
Dexter's sprawling account of the life of Warren Spooner may be classified as fiction, but it incorporates plenty from the author's own history. True, false, it doesn't much matter this gregarious curriculum vitae is just the ticket for those who like their comic realism served up with a side of Garpian absurdity. As a child, Spooner is outshined by siblings bursting with intellect while he bursts with urges: scab-eating, masturbating, and a compulsion to piss in neighbors' shoes that earns him the alias the Fiend of Vincent Heights. From this faintly repulsive youth, Dexter traces his hero through a stab at high-school baseball heroism and then into his career as a writer. The emotional core, however, is Spooner's relationship with his cautious yet luckless stepfather, Calmer. A once-promising ship commander whose botching of a sea burial began his slide toward mediocrity, Calmer is the steady path that forever eludes Spooner. But as both men grow older, their emotional fumbling toward each other becomes downright moving. A big, satisfying maybe-memoir.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2009 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Warren Spooner bears an uncanny resemblance to his creator, National Book Award winner Dexter. Like Dexter, Spooner was raised in Georgia, worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia, and was almost beaten to death in a bar fight. More conclusively, Spooner is also the author of a revisionist Western titled Deadwood (1986). Dexter follows his alter ego from childhood to semiretirement on Whidbey Island in Washington. This hilarious fictional memoir has little structure or plot and even less romance. Spooner devotes entire chapters to his favorite dogs but manages only a few dismissive sentences for the shadowy "Mrs. Spooner." Bar fights, bad divorces, car repossessions-the man's life is a 500-page country-and-western song. The glue that holds it all together is the relationship between Spooner and his stepfather, a cashiered naval officer aptly named Calmer. Verdict There is too much material here, but it is difficult to see where it could be cut. Dexter's prose is razor sharp, and every page has at least one zinger. The Georgia section in particular will remind readers of the great Harry Crews. Don't miss this.-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.