Lucky Man, Lucky Woman (Norton Paperback Fiction) Book

For a man who's happily married, gainfully employed, and living in Mystic, Connecticut--the kind of town other people visit on vacation--Perry Lafond is feeling something less than lucky. He spends a suspicious amount of time with his Portable Nietzsche. He wakes screaming from nightmares about his kid sister's death. He dutifully doses his infertile wife, Marcia, with Pergonal each morning, but he's less and less sure a baby is what he wants. Then he meets Angela Knudson, the sad, pretty wife of one of his parolee "clients," and he finds himself drawn to her in a decidedly unprofessional way. His involvement with the Knudsons deepens until, inevitably, it takes a turn for disaster, jeopardizing his job as a probation officer, his marriage, and everything he holds dear. Rest assured, Perry does emerge from his long dark night of the soul, but nothing about his life will ever be the same again. Lucky Man, Lucky Woman, winner of Pushcart's Editor's Book Award, is the kind of book in which the smallest detail rings true, from Perry's volatile buddy Wayne to the emotional permafrost of his Michigan upbringing. "Love, unlived and unfelt for so long, becomes only another desperate gesture in the end, a final grimace at all the pain hoarded over a lifetime," Perry realizes, returning after his mother's stroke. With his first novel, Jack Driscoll has created a wise, complex, generous-spirited portrait of one marriage and the pressures that surround it. --Mary ParkRead More