Leading the Cheers
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
* WINNER OF A WHITBREAD NOVEL AWARD *
A rich portrayal of small-town life with wonderfully evoked characters and beautifully observed writing.
Dan Silas returns to America for his high school reunion where he makes some unexpected discoveries. His former girlfriend tells him that her daughter was his child and Dan's oldest friend has suffered a breakdown and now believes himself to be the reincarnation of an Indian chief. In an attempt to make sense of these disturbing facts, Dan digs further into their lives, with both tragic and comic results.
'A wonderfully observed novel which provides a rare outsider's glimpse of the quiet despair that lurks behind those bright, perfectly-formed American smiles' Literary Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Cartwright's (The Face I Meet) story of a British man's return to the America of his high school years won England's Whitbread Award in 1998, it is likely to read less well on this side of the Atlantic, with its intermittently patronizing depiction of middle America. Dan Silas, a London-based former advertising executive whose professional and personal life is in disarray, returns to Hollybush, Mich., for his 30th high school reunion. He reunites with his old girlfriend Gloria, who informs him not only that is he is the father of her daughter, but that the daughter has been killed by a serial killer. He discovers as well that his beloved friend Gary, unbalanced since a breakdown during his freshman year at Harvard, believes himself to be Pale Eagle, a 19th-century follower of Tecumseh. Eager to connect with his old circle and to be moved by the generous, large-scale emotions that he feels are quintessentially American, Silas agrees to visit Gloria's daughter's killer in prison, and he also steals valuable Native American artifacts from a London museum for Gary. But Silas's unhesitating commitment to his classmates sits uneasily with his sense that he is "in the middle of nature with amiable morons." Gloria, whose "breasts have welded into a bosom" works at the biggest Christmas store in the country, populated by "frolicsome... very fat people"; Duane, another old acquaintance, has a "potato-dumpling look." Silas's obsession with aging, neglected bodies can be construed as an attempt at pathos; but since he never subjects himself to similar scrutiny, they seem to bespeak an author's contempt for the overfed flipside of American generosity rather than a damaged expatriate's uneasy reunion with people he once deeply loved.
