Outside Providence
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Outside Providence is a hilarious yet melancholy novel of a young man's coming of age in the 1970s. When Timothy Dunphy, native of working-class Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is packed off to a fancy prep school, he finds that the privileged elite is hardly immune to life's screwups. Dunphy must reconcile his pedigreed schoolmates with his mongrel friends back home--including Drugs Delaney, whose diet consists mainly of vitamin Qs (Quaaludes), and Bunny Cote, who thinks New England is a state.
Not far below Dunphy's comic demeanor churn powerful fears of abandonment by those he loves best: his mother, his girlfriend, and his closest friend. And he must come to terms with his complex relationship with the person he hates most, his father. As he struggles to live with the paradox of somehow loving the same man he blames for his family's tragedies, Dunphy begins to understand and accept life's betrayals, and learns how to trust in love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After growing up in Pawtucket, a blue-collar Rhode Island town, Timothy Dunphy is shipped off to an Episcopal prep school called Cornwall Academy in Connecticut. It is 1974, Dunphy is 16, and the game is to cut up as much as possible without getting caught. But amid drugged-out days and alcohol-soaked nights, the appealing Dunphy struggles with his two vividly depicted milieus: in gritty Pawtucket, his father continues to be abusive, and a close friend, Mousy Town, dies in a mysterious car accident, while back at school, vindictive administrators pile on punishments, former girlfriend S. D. Stuart commits suicide, and Dunphy tries to stay afloat among his spoiled, backstabbing fellow students. The one bright spot is Jane Weston, his girlfriend, but even their romance shatters, weeks before graduation. Things pick up for a bittersweet ending as Dunphyhaving learned the hard way not to trust his classmate, the charming Jack Raffertyadmits his love for his father and agrees to be friends with Jane. From the slang-filled, first-person narrative to the boarding-school atmosphere, even to details like a love interest named Jane, this debut is reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye, and, like Catcher, seems most appropriate for adolescents and college students. While Farrelly has written a humorous, sensitive and quite promising coming-of-age story, adults are likely to become impatient with the incessant profanity, drugs and alcohol, and the somewhat simplistic and obvious aspects.
