Violence: A Novel - Softcover

Bausch, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679743790 ISBN 13: 9780679743798

Publisher: Vintage, 1993

Synopsis

In this shattering novel, a man walks into a convenience store--which turns out to be precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. The near-death and seemingly arbitrary survival of Charles Connally are rendered with a realism, horror, and compassion that explore the strands of brutality running invisibly through his life, his wife's--and perhaps, that of the entire nation. Author reading tour.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Accompanied by his newly pregnant wife, Charles Connolly, an older college student on a visit to Chicago to see his mother, leaves his motel room one night late and walks into a convenience store. There, he is involved as a hostage in a murderous robbery that leaves four people dead (including one of the robbers); by throwing himself over another hostage, Charles saves her life. He is quickly acclaimed a hero at the scene, but he slinks off quickly, horrified. What has happened to him--the death, the heroics--seems only to exacerbate an apartness that has been threatening to drive him crazy. The more that people clamor for him, the more victimized he feels--a victimization that slowly and painfully comes to root in buried memories of child abuse and abandonment in his past. Bausch (The Fireman's Wife, Mrs. Field's Daughter, etc.) has worked the theme of a boy's desolation turned adult's disaffection in some of his stories as well--and though the outlines here are clear enough, the densities seem wrong: the book has the pained atmosphere of a short story, few of a novel's turns and complications--it reads like material Bausch never fully found his swing in, distanced and foggy. A disappointment. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

Expecting their first child, moody, impatient Charles Connolly and his somewhat dismayed young wife Carol travel to Chicago to celebrate Christmas with Charles's mother. During this visit, Charles is temporarily held hostage with a group of customers in a convenience store--an incident that ends in bloodshed. This random act of violence shatters the couple's marriage and leaves Charles paralyzed by guilt and fear. Praised as a hero who saved another's life, he is obsessed by the deaths he could not prevent and the realization that he did nothing heroic. Furthermore, the incident unleashes in Charles traumatic memories of violence suffered at the hands of his own father and fears that he too will be an abusive parent. Bausch's fifth novel is both a haunting tale of tangled events and a powerful psychological study.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679743790
• ISBN 13: 9780679743798
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 293