All Joe Knight
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Kevin Morris goes for a slam dunk in his debut novel" about the undoing of an American Dreamer in the Philly suburbs (Vanity Fair Hot Type).
1961. Outside Philadelphia, a soon-to-be father runs into a telephone pole while driving drunk; nine months later, his widow dies in a smashed-up T-Bird. From the start, the orphaned Joe Knight is a blank slate. Taken in by a kindly aunt in a tough-skinned suburb, Joe finds his family in high school with the Fallcrest basketball team.
Fast-forward thirty years. Joe is divorced with a daughter and certain he's unfit for love. Ever since selling the ad firm he built from the ground up for millions, he's been wiling away his time at strip clubs to quiet his mind. Then Chris Scully, former Fallcrest teammate-turned DA, tips him off to a criminal probe into the buyout that got Joe rich years ago—a deal he shared with every member of the basketball team, except for Scully. As Joe's possible transgressions unreel, he is forced to face the disillusionment inside himself and a secret that has haunted him for decades.
A "remarkable and agonizing . . . incendiary look at modern life" (Esquire), All Joe Knight features "an anti-hero for our times . . . John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom revised for the Trump era—more profane and straight-talking" (USA Today, 3/4 stars), a man who achieved the American Dream and is now scrambling to survive it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Morris's debut novel (following the story collection White Man's Problems) explores a narcissist's search for meaning in a world that he treats with disdain. Joe Knight never met his father who "ran into a telephone pole" ending a "nonstop bender" that began when his wife told him she was pregnant and was orphaned at six months when his mother's body was found with another man in a "smashed-up T-bird." He is raised by his aunt Dottie in the middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia. Joe is a member of the 1977 78 Fallcrest High School basketball team, which offers him a sense of belonging and a glimmer of the greatness that he feels he is destined for, despite his rocky start. ("I'll light you up all night long. All Knight Long," the narrator says.) Decades later, Joe is divorced with a daughter and living alone in Philadelphia. He's "made enough money" from the sale of his advertising agency and "cut off enough strings that I don't have to do anything and I like it." When his old teammate Chris Scully a starter to Joe's bench position now the district attorney of Dover County, tips Joe off that federal prosecutors are investigating the sale of his company to a French conglomerate, a deal that Joe cut most of his old teammates in on, it pushes Joe to reckon with his relationships. Pennsylvania and basketball are Updike territory, and one can read this story as homage (Joe's ex is named Janice, like Rabbit Angstrom's wife). Even as an echo of Rabbit's mid-century angst, Morris's novel deftly shows that the frustrations of a stunted middle-aged man are evocative terrain.
