Spooner
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3.9 • 22 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service.
This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What can you do when your twin brother, dead at birth, is your mother's favorite? This is only one of the burdens placed on young Warren Spooner, the hero of National Book Award winner Dexter's calamitously funny and riotously tragic new novel. Spooner, who tends toward a life of criminal mischief, turns out to be a baseball phenom, but after an elbow injury puts an end to his pitching career, he ends up a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia, where he's so universally disliked that firing him is at the top of his editor's to-do list. Spooner eventually settles down, becomes a columnist and published novelist, and starts a family. He is dogged, though, by a combination of bad luck and bad judgment, and eventually retreats to Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington State, where he learns that good fences don't necessarily make good neighbors. Spooner's story is juxtaposed with that of his stepfather, Calmer Ottosson, a naval officer turned high school principal, whose dedication to his family is in direct contrast to his stepson's bellicose adventures. Although raggedly plotted, the rambunctious narrative is filled with hilarious scenes, including a naval burial at sea that goes horribly awry, a literary luncheon featuring Spooner and Margaret Truman that ends with a stampede of little old ladies, and a misguided act of vengeance that backfires and puts Spooner in the hospital. The novel's premise that life is one big vale of tears and that writing about it wittily and exuberantly is the best one can do might not work in real life, but it pays off in spades for Dexter and his tragicomically conflicted alter ego.
Customer Reviews
Comic tragedy
As odd as Spooner is he is all of us, or at least one feels a sympathetic kinship with the poor misfit.
The story of Spooner is funny, painful and pathetic but not exactly depressing. The prose is well crafted and well honed to best convey the character
Of Spooner in such a way so as to make us love him and yet feel sorry for him.
It reminds me of John Irving's writing in that the author relates idiotic tragedies that befall stange people in outlandish situations without burying us in pathos but still conveying the heart of life.