The King is Dead Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The King is Dead Book

A father's shame is explored by his son in The King Is Dead, the third novel by Jim Lewis. Walter Selby, a decorated WW II veteran, becomes a speech writer and strategist for a prominent Tennessee politician; marries Nicole, a decade younger; and lives with all the trappings of the Southern upper-middle class, including two small children, Frank and Gail. A political debacle causes the fiercely moral Walter to resign, and he returns home early, only to find Nicole has been unfaithful. The second half of the novel follows Frank--who recalls little of his parents after his adoption--as a known, but declining, actor approached by a famous actress, Lenore, to star in her swan song. Lewis displays considerable writing talent, such as when Frank explains to Lenore that he never talks about his real father, and "[s]he sounded surprised by the notion, and slightly incredulous, as if he'd told her that he'd never tasted orange juice, or that he'd once gone a year without sleeping." The novel is constructed to showcase Lewis's astute musings on love, sex, and death, but gives short shrift to the relationship between Frank and his ancestry. Instead, Frank's time is spent recalling his first love, Kimmie, and their sexual experiences (in vivid detail). While engaging characters abound, the plot of The King Is Dead becomes suppressed and merely strings them along. --Michael FerchRead More

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  • Product Description

    the breakthrough novel from one of the most talented and celebrated young novelists in America -- a stirring, sweeping romance about a Good Woman and her Good Man, falling into bed, into marriage, into parenthood, into responsibility, and out again...The King Is Dead is that simple-but-beautiful, forever-compelling thing: the story of a heart-stirring romance that breeds a family and a history, then fades to black -- out of which something else is born. We're in the American South -- it's the New South born of the New Deal. The old ways of the Confederacy have been eliminated by all that Yankee efficiency and progress, except of course they haven't. We have a Good Man, Walter, moving into the heart of the machinery of American life, as the indispensable eyes and ears of the wily Governor of Tennessee. He meets his Good Woman, Nicole, in a ballpark carpark, a perfect crucible for an emblematic American romance; they banter and spar in best Bogart-Bacall fashion, then fall to billing and cooing, and, after proper delay, into bed, into marriage, into parenthood, into responsibility. And we follow that long, lovely fall. And then where are they? What can surprise them? What can rend their sweet, earned ease asunder? Well, you'll see...Along the way, the defining moments of a life, of a family history, are given in surprising, gorgeous prose, which has an incantatory luxury to it. You recline into this prose, comfortable as can be, and don't ever want to rise out of it. It's quite a departure for Jim Lewis. This third novel has been a long time coming, and it's very much a case of Great Third LP Syndrome, following Startlingly Inventive Ethereal First Album (Sister) and Difficult, Elusive Second Album (Why the Tree Loves the Axe). This is what we've been waiting for. This is why we wait.

  • 0007135238
  • 9780007135233
  • Jim Lewis
  • 4 August 2003
  • Flamingo
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 240
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