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The Paperboy (Paperback)
by Pete Dexter
| Category:
Fairness, Bestsellers, Ages 9-12, Children's book |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
MSL price:
¥ 198.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
This book raises important issues regarding the press, and in the process tells an exciting story about the search for justice. |
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Author: Pete Dexter
Publisher: Delta
Pub. in: January, 1996
ISBN: 0385315724
Pages: 336
Measurements: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BC00051
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times Bestseller ranking #72,861 in Books on Amazon.com on 30th, Nov, 2006) |
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- MSL Picks -
A National Book Award-winning novelist whose last tale was set among mobsters in Philadelphia (Brotherly Love, 1991) here proves his ability to shift to completely different venues with ease. Set in the fetid swamps of northern Florida, the novel concerns the legal case of Hillary Van Wetter, who has been condemned to death for the murder of the county sheriff. Nineteen-year-old Jack James, son of the local newspaper publisher and delivery boy for the daily editions, narrates the story, which begins with Charlotte Bless, an interloping southern floozy just past her prime who takes an obsessive interest in Van Wetter's case. Jack's elder brother, Ward, a reporter in Miami, also detects a story in Van Wetter's predicament and returns to his native Moat County to investigate. He brings along the handsome, ambitious writer Yardley Acheman, whose stylistic flash is matched by his willingness to cut ethical corners. The group's inquiry drives this novel's action, taking them through the swamp, to death row, and on to Daytona Beach. The reporters ultimately win a tainted Pulitzer Prize, and Van Wetter is freed. That much is clear; more murky are Jack's interrelationships with his father and brother. Despite leaving too many loose ends, Dexter has created vibrant characters who fit snugly in their hot, languid setting.
Target readers:
Kids aged up 8
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Pete Dexter, author of six novels, is known for his uncommon mixture of comedy and violence. He often uses the idiosyncratic settings of his stories and unusual characters to heighten the dark humor of the situations that he chooses to write about.
Dexter's newest novel, "Train" (2003), revolves around an unlikely trio in San Diego. These characters are Lionel Walk, nicknamed Train, a talented young black golfer who caddies for Miller Packard, a white police sergeant. Norah Still, a beautiful survivor of a yacht hijacking becomes a part of the mix, when Packard is sent to investigate the crime scene. The tensions between such diverse characters become increasingly conflated as the novel progresses.
"Dexter explores racism with a cold eye in "Train"-rarely politically correct and always unafraid to find pettiness in the lives of liberal whites, beatniks, philanthropists, and powerful Afro-Americans."
Mixing his trademark dark comedy with characters that are as reckless as they are vulnerable, Dexter weaves together a plot that highlights the social tension of the 50s.
"Paris Trout" (1998), Dexter's third book, won the National Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. "Paris Trout" looks at how a small town in Georgia during the 50s reacts to the shooting of an innocent girl. The town's white hardware owner and loanshark, Paris Trout, becomes angry when Henry Ray Boxer, a young black man, refuses to make his payments. Trout takes the law into his own hands and ends up killing a young girl who lives with Boxer. Though Trout is convicted of the murder, he doesn't acknowledge that what he has done is a crime and instead bribes his way out of prison and begins to spiral out of control.
"an expertly crafted and bleakly fascinating tale of social conflict and madness in the deep South." - "Publishers Weekly"
Dexter's other novels include "God's Pocket" (1984), which begins with the death of Leon Hubbard, a construction worker in South Philadelphia and then traces back the story and ramifications of this event; "Deadwood" (1986), a story about the American folk hero James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok as an aging legend and the events that his death brings about; "Brotherly Love" (1993), a novel which traces the not-so-brotherly love of Peter Flood and his cousin, Michael who become targets of separate mob hits; and "The Paperboy" (1995) which traces the adventures of a pair of reporters who investigate, amongst a series of obstacles, the case of an innocent man, Hillary Van Wetter, who is facing execution.
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The sun was rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.
Then Ward James, hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free-and meet-her convicted "fiancé."
With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of The Story, racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a back seat to headline news...
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On a cold winter morning four years later, early in 1969-in the same year my brother would blossom as a journalist-I lost my swimming scholarship at the University of Florida. A few weeks afterward, I was expelled for an act of vandalism.
Specifically, I drank a small bottle of vodka and drained the swimming pool, which, while childish, is more complicated work than it may seem from the outside. I don't want to get into the mechanics of it now, but let me assure you that you don't just pull the plug.
I returned home, ashamed, and went to work at my father's newspaper, the Moat County Tribune, driving a delivery truck.
My father never asked what had happened to me in Gainesville, or if I intended to go back, but it was clear that he meant for me to drive the truck until I saw it was this life's one alternative to a college education.
He was not formally educated himself, and often spoke of his fact as if it were something lost. "Lord, I would have loved to study literature," he would say, as if he needed permission from a college to read books.
All that winter and spring I drove the north route for the Tribune, traveling 325 miles over the narrow, mostly shoulderless two-lane roads of northern Moat County. I loaded the truck in the dark, passing the sign marking Thorn's city limits by three-thirty in the morning.
Each morning at nine o'clock, if the truck didn't break own and the press runs were on time, I came to the clearing where Sheriff Call's car had been found. The spot was partially hidden from the road-a baked, treeless circle cut to a stand of pines, a picnic table and two outdoor toilets no more than twenty feet apart, the men's to the east, the Ladies' to the west. A marker indicated the spot where the best school in the state had once stood, and a hand-painted gun attached to one of the privies showed a Confederate flag and a hand unconnected to any arm, and across these pages the legend moat county extends a welcome hand to yankees!
Fifteen miles down the road was my last stop of the day--ten papers that I was required to place facedown on a makeshift wooden table just behind the gum ball machines inside sun-faded country store run by an indeterminate number of members of the Van Wetter family, who did not want their patrons met with bad news as they came in the door.
What specific blood connection these Van Wetters had to the man Sheriff Call stomped to death, I do not know. The Van Wetters occupied half a column of the Moat County telephone book and their children rarely married outside the family. Calculating the collateral relations was beyond me, even if the Van Wetters had been inclined to discuss their family tree, which they were not.
I can only tell you that some mornings an old man was there, blind and freshly angry, as if the blindness had come over him in the night. He would make his way to the papers I had brought and count them, moving the folded edges up into the palm of his hand with his fingers, as if he were tickling them, his face scowling up into the window like a sour plant growing to light. And some mornings it was his wife.
Other times there was a young, pregnant woman with the most beautiful skin I had ever seen, whose children would run through a curtain and into the back when I came into the store.
This woman never looked up, but a moment after the children had disappeared, a man whose face had been burned-whose skin creased at his eye like a badly ironed shirt-would emerge from the curtain and stand a foot inside the room, his hands at his sides, watching until I had stacked the papers and left.
Once, when I had forgotten to collect for the week, I went back into the store and found him still standing where I'd left him, staring at her as she straightened boxes of candy bars in the case under the counter.
She looked at me then, for an instant, and it was as if I'd brought some bad news beyond what was in my newspapers.
It was possible, I think, that anytime the door opened it was bad news for her.
I never heard her speak to the man with the burned face, I'd I never heard him speak to her. I assumed they were man and wife.
I would finish the route before ten, park the truck, walk the six blocks home, and fall into bed with a beer and a copy of the newspaper I had been delivering all morning. Early in the afternoon, I would slip away from the stories in the paper into a jumpy sleep, full of dreams, waking up a few hours later in this, the same room where I had slept all the nights of my childhood, not knowing where I was.
Something like that had been happening at Gainesville too, and sometimes in those moments between dreams and consciousness, when I was lost, I glimpsed myself as untied to either place.
I would get out of bed then and walk to the city pool and swim laps. Or, when I could borrow my father's truck-he kept his new Chrysler in the driveway and left the garage for a beloved twelve-year-old Ford pickup which he used only to go fishing--I drove north to St. Augustine and would swim out into the ocean a mile or more, until my arms and legs were dead weight, and then slowly, allowing the water to hold me up, I would turn and make my way back.
I threw myself away and was returned intact to the beach, and in this way I was somehow saved from those moments it had taken, fresh from sleep, to recognize the room where my most private thoughts had been thought, and private courses set, for all my life. The walls of my childhood.
You could say I was afraid to sleep.
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Karlis Streips (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
I read Paris Trout (which I picked up wondering what the City of Light and fish have to do with one another) and was hooked. Pete Dexter writes books about people you don't really want to know - racists, violent men, drunks, people who are depressed to the point of dragging you down with them - but he gets his hooks in you on page one and never lets go. Paperboy is basically about failure and how close we are to it even when it seems that life is going OK - something can come into our lives that takes it all apart. The story is magnificently told in prose so tight that you can almost hear typewriter keys clicking away (Pete Dexter's books don't read like they were produced on a word processor). Best of all, there are the many places in the book where the words "as if" or "like" appear. Nobody does descriptive comparisons better. This is a great book, just like the other Pete Dexter books - you just can't go wrong with him. |
Mary Whipple (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Telling a dark story about investigative reporting and the people involved in it, Pete Dexter sets his story in 1965 - 1969, in Moat County, Florida. Jack James, the narrator, is a college dropout who works as a driver and general gofer for his idealistic brother Ward, a reporter for the Miami Times, and his writing partner, Yardley Acheman, an attention-seeking dandy. The two writers are investigating the possibility that Hillary Van Wetter, convicted of the murder of the sheriff in the town where Ward grew up, may have had an alibi--along with an incompetent attorney. Charlotte Bless, an attractive woman who has a fetish for death row inmates like Hillary, aids them by providing mountains of files she has collected about the murder.
As Ward and Yardley investigate, Dexter explores the newspaper business. Questions they raise about Van Wetter's legal counsel, a famous good-ol'-boy attorney, affect the reputation and popularity of Ward James's father, owner of the local newspaper, sending his ad revenues plummeting. When Ward is physically unable to continue working on the story, Acheman and an editor from Miami rush the story into print and the second phase of the novel begins.
Ward James and Yardley Acheman reflect the drive of reporters to succeed and their tendency to identify personally with their stories. The aftereffects of the reporters' investigation into the Van Wetter case, which constitute phase two, grow exponentially, further affecting the reporters, Ward James's father, Charlotte Bless, and, obviously Hillary Van Wetter, as the national media become involved. Along the way, Dexter raises ethical questions, not just about the ethics of reporting, but about the ability of the press to control outcomes and public perceptions. Ultimately, he raises the issue of whether justice is served when the egos of reporters and the desire to sell newspapers cause the media to lose their sense of perspective and cloud their judgment about what is right.
Dexter, an outstanding writer of (sometimes earthy) dialogue, is brilliant in his selection of revealing details, especially the mannerisms of his sometimes odd characters-how they move, speak, and respond to direct questions. Ultimately, most face ironic destinies. While this novel may not have the intense thematic focus of Paris Trout, which won the National Book Award in 1988, it raises important issues regarding the press, and in the process tells an exciting story about the search for justice.
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M. Prufer (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Pete Dexter is one of the most overlooked writers around. His style is beautifully lyrical, insightful with great characterization. Granted, his stories are dark examples of the human condition but well worth the journey. If you want a fast-moving plot, a pretty story or happy endings, you won't find them here. What you will find is some of the best writing you will ever read. I must admit to a bias here because Pete and I worked together in the '70s at a couple of newspapers so I consider him a friend. But I'm also a book editor and reviewer and read a lot, and I've read all Pete's books and consider this one of the best. Now, if he'll quit writing movie scripts ("Rush" and "Michael" to name a couple) long enough to write another fine novel, we'd all be happy! |
Jay S (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Quite similar in tone to Paris Trout and Brotherly Love. As with Dexter's other novels, the book revolves around the characters studies. The author implies that while one person's life is defined by what they have done, another's is defined by what they have not done. For those in the latter category, determining if something is truly missing or simply thought to be missing from their lives can prove to be the character's salvation or undoing. Apart from the characters, the scene descriptions, particularly of the Florida swampland, are quite well written. You can almost feel the mud between your toes. |
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