Karoo
A Novel
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2.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Early in this hilarious novel, readers will be laughing out loud, but Tesich is ultimately quite serious about reminding us that moments or years of ‘unlove’ can never be set right.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
Originally published in 1998, shortly after the author’s untimely death, this splendid paperback edition, with an introduction by E. L. Doctorow, brings to the spotlight a book of shining causticity, humor, insight, and originality
Saul Karoo thinks. But understanding eludes. He lusts. And sometimes with success. He drinks. But he cannot get drunk. Karoo is a professional fixer of other people’s scripts and, by his own acknowledgment, he ruins them all.
Calamity and comedy follow shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. But he is not without resources, namely his wit, his ex-wife, and his irrepressible soul, which in its own way is reminiscent of another bighearted broken man of literature: Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Finally, he is a man prone to luck both bad and good, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his past shows up, the plot of his own life comes into sharp focus.
Steve Tesich has grounded his story in the highly recognizable world of New York in the late 1980s, a milieu of unscrupulous producers from the West Coast, dry cleaners, divorce, and fantasies of escape. Karoo is a haunting, highly human, deliciously realistic novel of decline, fall, and rejuvenation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Early in this hilarious novel, readers will be laughing out loud, but Tesich is ultimately quite serious about reminding us that moments or years of "unlove" can never be set right. Wisecracking narrator Saul Karoo, a Hollywood script doctor living in New York, is a heavy drinker and smoker, a hypochondriac who refuses to get health insurance because he "no longer has his health." In the novel's opening scene, Karoo spends the last Christmas party of the 1980s wondering how he can avoid taking his adopted, college-age son, Billy, home with him that night (he succeeds, after a fashion, by taking home a sloshed young woman instead). Billy's goal is to connect with his father, but Karoo evades intimacy on every level as steadfastly as he ducks the truth: he lies constantly, yet his first-person narrative reveals an entertaining man at once sensitive and indifferent. Haunted by the harm he's done, he longs to reform but seems incapable of playing the game straight. Meanwhile, Machiavellian superproducer Jay Cromwell (who makes Karoo look like a "moral force of his time") sends him an unreleased film by venerable director Arthur Houseman. Karoo recognizes that the film is a masterpiece, but Cromwell wants him to restructure it--a process that has in the past led to one screenwriter's suicide. Karoo refuses the Houseman film until the cassette leads him to Billy's biological mother and he suddenly thinks he sees a way to make everyone happy. Tesich (Summer Crossing, and many screenplays, including Academy Award-winning Breaking Away) knew New York and Hollywood well. The movie-making scenes here are classic. Even though the end of this posthumously published novel doesn't live up to the humor and poignancy of the rest, Tesich's memorable characters, particularly Karoo, will endure.
Customer Reviews
Please make it stop!
The most pompous book I've read in years.