Three Delays
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $0.99
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Publisher Description
“Mind-blowing… This isn’t Smith’s first tale of toxic and nihilistic obsession, but it is his most ravishing, painfully funny, and wildly mythic.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Smith is not only a spectacular stylist but also a visionary.” —Washington Post Book World
From Charlie Smith (Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Chimney Rock, Shine Hawk), author of three New York Times Notable Books and a literary stylist whose “writing can make the mountains ring" (New York Times Book Review), comes his first novel in more than a decade, Three Delays, which follows the troubled lives of two lovers as they combat their passions and each other. In the words of James Dickey, "Writers after Charlie Smith will have to take him into account, but I doubt if any will equal or surpass him."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and novelist Smith's latest foray into fiction (after poetry collection Word Comix) is a moody love story (of sorts) in which a man and a woman seem destined never to find permanent happiness. Billy Brent, a former child preacher turned globe-trotting druggie, has been drawn to Alice Stephens since young Billy, acting as minister at Alice's Tom Thumb wedding, attacked the groom. They've been brutal together ever since. Whether he's traipsing around Europe with his friend Henry or working as a reporter in Miami, Billy can't get Alice off his mind, even though she's married to someone else. And though their troubled past does not bode well for a common future, they can't help themselves; amid trips on smugglers' boats, stints in jail, fistfights, and plenty of drugs, the occasionally violent lovers desperately try to figure out a way to be together without destroying one another. Smith's prose is the star: it's unruly, full of an agitated energy, darkly funny and generously dashed with lyricism. But the moments of enchantment diffuse into mystification, and the restlessness so apparent in the characters and prose infects the reader, leading to exhaustion rather than enlightenment.
