Spooner

Pete Dexter

$26.99

Publication Date: September 1st, 2009

Publisher:

Grand Central Publishing

ISBN:

9780446540728

Pages:

480

Pete Dexter's tale of the troubled Warren Spooner and his court-martialed navy officer step-dad, Calmer Ottosson, defies comparison. Dexter's eye for detail, taste for the absurd, and dark and disturbing wit are all unparalleled in contemporary literature. Dexter has always deserved a much larger readership, and Spooner is just the book to bring it to him.

Dave Mallmann, Next Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, WI

September 2009 Indie Next List

Description

Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand.

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.

Praise for Spooner

Pete Dexter, writing of the part played by love in the exuberant life of his hero, Spooner, and the fatal inevitability of the compromises that make life bearable, has given us a novel of picaresque vitality--outlandish, anecdotal, profuse, funny, profound.
-Susanna Moore, author of My Old Sweetheart and In the Cut