The Silver Ghost - Hardcover

Kinder, Chuck

4.53

19 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151240671 ISBN 13: 9780151240678

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979

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Fiction. Jimbo Stark, teenage soldier of fortune, loves, fights, drinks, mopes, and steals his way through this brilliant novel of the late 1950s. His America glows with an almost romantic light—it is an electric, song-filled garden for teenage love, where everything is possible, even heroism. Imagining himself sometimes as James Dean's reincarnation, sometimes as a beatnik gangster poet straight out of Jack Kerouac, Jimbo lives a legend of his own construction. THE SILVER GHOST is a wonderful novel of coming of age in America—letter perfect in its evocation of an almost mythical time, and powerfully affecting in its portrait of its hero. In a dazzlingly shifting series of set-pieces, flashbacks, and reveries, Chuck Kinder cuts back and forth from caper to sentiment to myth, from self-pity to self-mockery. With deft comic sense, a complex and winning hero, and a supporting cast of vividly realized characters, Kinder writes about Jimbo Stark with the same mixture of fond memory and relief that it's over that we all have toward that time when we, too, were perfectly seventeen; he makes THE SILVER GHOST one of the very best—and most sensationally written—novels of adolescence.

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About the Author:

Chuck Kinder is the author of novels Snakehunter, THE SILVER GHOST (Braddock Avenue Books, 2016), and Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a memoir, Last Mountain Dancer, and the poetry collections All That Yellow and IMAGINATION MOTEL (Six Gallery Press, 2014). A native of West Virginia, he has been a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Davis and the University of Alabama. A long-time professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, he now lives in Key Largo with his wife, Diane Cecily.

Review:

THE SILVER GHOST remains delightful and compelling, a demonstration of the range of one of the American novel's most original and accomplished voices. Kinder's mastery of irony, long before it was the theme song of a generation, has always given his work a sly power. There are both belly laughs and tears ahead for any reader. --Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and Ultimate Punishment

Chuck Kinder nails so beautifully a time, place, and state of mind in America, the time right before Everything Changed, that it's only fitting this classic is being re-introduced to an American audience ripe for not nostalgia, mind you a reminder of the magic some young dreamers dreamed a few decades ago. Kinder's Jimbo Stark is so real and close he breaks your heart and makes you whoop and jive just like James Dean did in his day. This is a must-read in contemporary American literature. --Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and Miss Jane: A Novel

I loved the Beat cadences and big heart of this book. A dreamlike ride through lost innocence. Chuck Kinder deserves to be up there with Ray Carver and Jack Kerouac a true American original. --April Smith, author of A Star for Mrs. Blake

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