Hunger in America: A Novel - Hardcover

Cates, David Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671738178 ISBN 13: 9780671738174

Publisher: Summit Books, 1992

Synopsis

Jack Dempsey Cliff travels to Kodiak, Alaska, in search of the father who had walked out when Jack was just a baby, but what he finds instead is a disturbing and desperate glimpse at humanity though the eyes of the strangers he meets in barrooms

About this title

Reviews

The sad account of a sad young man pursuing his dead father through the wastes of Alaska: a lugubrious first novel that runs aground on the narrator's grief. In 1983 in Kodiak, Alaska, Jack Dempsey Cliff drives a cab during the long night before his 30th birthday. An expatriate farmboy from Wisconsin, he has come north to escape his girlfriend's pregnancy, just as his own father had three decades before. ``It was a survival tactic, going to Alaska....Jack was tired of waiting for a dead father to come home. And he was so tired of being angry he didn't think he could feel anything else anymore.'' In Kodiak, he works the night-shift, hangs out with the other drifters, and picks up anecdotes about his father, who had fished the waters nearby for 15 years until he went down in an ice- storm. This is a story of anticipation and grief, in which the metaphor of Jack's flight is meant to show the desperation of his quest, the fury of his anxiety: we are reminded throughout that Jack's father was a survivor--a boxer, a prisoner of war who had outlived the death marches and Hell Ships of Bataan--and we are obviously meant to see Jack's exile as an attempt to discover within himself the foundation of that strength that had sustained his father. Unfortunately, though, Cates decides at the last minute that his story is a tragedy rather than a pilgrimage, and tacks on a baroque climax that is as absurd as it is incongruous. Soggy melodrama without much originality. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This compact yet digressive first novel addresses a popular theme: the adult child's quest for an unknown father. Troubled by the mystery surrounding his father, a boxer, World War II POW, and ice storm victim, Jack Dempsey Cliff leaves his fiancee and Wisconsin home for Kodiak, where he drives a cab and sleeps in a tent, speaking in monosyllables but observing much. During one long Memorial Day night, brief encounters provide Jack with strong associations and desires. He listens to a troubled woman cab driver, a young drifter who knew his father, and an elusive Indian woman with a gun, making their stories his. At night's end, Jack and his acquaintances gather for an unexpectedly abrupt and violent denouement (to both characters and readers). An optional purchase for popular and regional fiction collections.
- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Summit Books
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671738178
• ISBN 13: 9780671738174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 202