Swimming with Bridgeport Girls
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Swimming with Bridgeport Girls is an “outstanding debut…entertaining and sometimes sad, a superb portrait of a troubled but wisecracking gambler. Think Carl Hiaasen meets Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler” (Library Journal, starred review).
Ray Parisi is in trouble. Fired from his anchor job at ESPN after one-too-many public humiliations, he is holed up in a motel and in desperate need of a break. His ex-wife is shacking up with another guy in his old house, a bookie wants to kill him, and he’s wanted by the New York State Police. A few days before the Fourth of July, he unexpectedly receives an inheritance from his long-lost father, and it seems like all of his problems might be solved. Determined to get his life back together, Ray hatches an imaginative but highly suspect plan to win back his wife, dashing from Connecticut to Las Vegas to Memphis in an attempt to secure his future before the past runs him down. The cast of characters he meets along the way is as loveable as it is absolutely insane.
If Swimming with Bridgeport Girls “were a Springsteen album, it would be Devils & Dust: partly set in Las Vegas, it evinces hope and humor but is dark and gritty at its core” (Kirkus Reviews). Anthony Tambakis’s first novel is an uproarious romantic comedy about a charismatic gambler who loses everything and sets off on a mission to—against all odds—finally get it right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first novel, Tambakis stacks the deck against his gambling-addicted protagonist, Ray Parisi, a fired ESPN personality whose life is in free fall. As the story opens, he is still in love with his recently divorced wife, L, though she is dating another man; a bookie is after him for money; and he is wanted by the Connecticut state police for attacking a losing jockey. A windfall inheritance from his late, estranged father sends Ray off to Las Vegas in a quixotic scheme to raise a grubstake to purchase some property in Atlanta that has special meaning to his Southern-born ex. In Las Vegas, Ray romances the fickle Lady Luck, but it's too late: L announces that she is going to marry her lover. So Ray flies off to Memphis, where he enlists some help in derailing her impending wedding (shenanigans include hopping the wall at Graceland). The author does an excellent job of recreating the noon-at-midnight feel of a Las Vegas booze-and-gambling binge. But Ray, as a character, remains problematic. He is a fine, witty companion in the early going, but after a while, this poster boy for arrested development becomes a bit of a bore. Late in the story, the meaning of the title becomes clear and supposedly offers insight into Ray's actions. But it comes too late to revitalize this study of a flawed man's wildly wrongheaded search for redemption.