I had been living alone again--had been for
nearly a year--when 1 learned that my kid had
set hi mselfonfire. So begins the story of Earl
Dimes, a management consultant by trade and
a novelist by calling, whose carefully orches-
trated life comes apart at the seams. Riveting
as narrative, achingly true in its emotional
impact, it is a vibrant, tragicomic tale of one
man s awakening to the emptiness of forty years
of an emotionally guarded existence.
Earl, born in Maine to Jack and Nola Dimes,
has learned early the lesson of emotional self-
protection, for his parents self-absorption
effectively shuts out him and his brother
Richie. As Earl grows up, however, and mar-
ries into the ebullient Italian-American
Stephano family of Long Island, the lesson, we
see, has terrible consequences. His marriage to
Linda stumbles along for fifteen years and
produces one son--Keefer. Earl does well in
business, becoming financially secure, and
even manages to publish a well-regarded novel.
But these "successeS do not produce hap-
piness, for he cannot connect emotionally with
his wife and son. It s as though Earl lives his
life behind a wall of plate glass, safe, he
believes, from the vulnerability that is the
inevitable result of giving oneself fully to
others.
The glass wall is shattered abruptly when
Linda throws him out after his one act of
infidelity--one of the funniest scenes in recent
fiction.Earl s well-ordered world fails apart and
he loses everything--his lucrative job, his
carefully built-up fortification of creature com-
forts, and, most painful of all, access to Keefer.
Using any stratagem he can think of, Earl
tries to piece his life together again and to make sense of it.
發表於2024-11-07
Alone: A Novel 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
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Alone: A Novel 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載