The Man in the Window: A Novel - Hardcover

Cohen, Jon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446515345 ISBN 13: 9780446515344

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1992

Synopsis

Disfigured since he was sixteen, Louis has spent years in the confines of his mother's home until he accidently meets Iris, a tough, efficient nurse, cursed since birth with a repulsive appearance

About this title

About the Author

Jon Cohen has previously written the books Shots in the Dark (Norton, PB 2001), and Aging with Grace (2001 HC), which received a Christopher Award. He has covered biomedical science for 15 years, including for the maagzines New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Science, Smithsonian, and Discover, the newspapers the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the on-line publication Slate.

From Kirkus Reviews

By the author of the arresting Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger (1990): a Marty-themed, whimsical novel with flashes of bright fantasy and high hilarity--all about two losing loners who find each other--and love. The story begins with the death of retired hardware-store owner Atlas Malone--no simple affair, involving as it does greetings, conversing with, and digging the message of a most familiar angel. Here, dying is a far from peaceful matter--whether in the Malone preserves, where live Atlas's wife Gracie and horribly disfigured son Louis, or in the Intensive Care Unit of the local hospital, where toils short, squat, unlovely Iris. Take one long-term patient, the dying comatose Tube Man who will speak--one ghostly word at a time. Then there's the town undertaker, who grabbed a gold ring after dying--for a reason having to do with an old dirty deed. Another wrongdoer will show up in the hospital, the ever-drunk Harvey, a link to Louis because Harvey had shared a transcendent moment with Louis 16 years before, when the teen-age and then handsome Louis had yet to be disfigured by the fire Harvey claims he set. Of course, Louis, a recluse these many years, always encased in a scarf and hat, and Iris the lowly and lonely, do get together--but it's only after Louis's plummet (or was it an ascension?) from a second-story window and a gathering of the world as represented by the neighbors who accompany him in a loud caravan to the hospital. Then, while Iris and Louis heed the incredible summons to love, Gracie and Iris's tottery father also pair off. An attractive flight into romance's more fabulous dimension- -but whether or not the fantastic palls, the ructions and crackings wise by the nurses laboring at incredible machines and patients are a fascination and delight. Cohen continues to bemuse and entertain. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0446515345
• ISBN 13: 9780446515344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 245