Spooner

By Pete Dexter
(Grand Central Publishing, Hardcover, 9780446540728, 480pp.)

Publication Date: September 2009

Other Editions of This Title: Paperback, Hardcover

Categories: Literary

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the September 2009 Indie Next List

Pete Dexter began his working life with a U.S. Post office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He wasn't very good at mail and quit, then caught on as a newspaper reporter in Florida, which he was not very good at, got married, and was not very good at that. In Philadelphia he became a newspaper columnist, which he was pretty good at, and got divorced, which you would have to say he was good at because it only cost $300.

Dexter remarried, won the National Book Award and built a house in the desert so remote that there is no postal service. He's out there six months a year, pecking away at the typewriter, living proof of the adage What goes around comes around--that is, you quit the post office, pal, and the post office quits you.

The end of another year means another giant stack of books you missed during the past 12 months. Nancy Pearl, our favorite librarian, stops by to share recommendations that should keep old, young and 'tween readers content. More at NPR.org

The young boy in Pete Dexter's new novel, Spooner, bears a striking resemblance to the author himself. But Dexter insists that he hasn't written a memoir, only a novel with "a lot happier ending than life was." More at NPR.org

Pete Dexter, writing of the part played by love in the exuberant life of his hero, Spooner, and the fatal inevitability of the compromises that make life bearable, has given us a novel of picaresque vitality--outlandish, anecdotal, profuse, funny, profound.
-Susanna Moore, author of My Old Sweetheart and In the Cut