Lives of the Saints: A Novel - Hardcover

Slavitt, David R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689120796 ISBN 13: 9780689120794

Publisher: Atheneum, 1989

Synopsis

The narrator, a down-and-out journalist in Florida, investigates a mass-murder case that paradoxically helps him come to terms with his wife's death

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This remarkably dark, funny and spiritually anguished novel begins as Slavitt's narrator, a down-and-out journalist for a sleazy Florida tabloid, writes up the life of a victim of a mass-murder at the local Piggly-Wiggly. Conducting his gruesomely offhand investigation, he introduces the reader to his philosophy of why things occur as they do, citing the works of an 18th-century rationalist philosopher named Malebranche, who believed all things happen through the will of God, and that individual destiny has nothing to do with cause and effect. The narrator's twisted ruminations take on coherence as we learn of his recent loss of both wife and daughter in a car accident, and of the souring of his career as a university professor, which led him in a fit of self-loathing to write for the tabloids. As he drifts aimlessly from one tabloid sensation to another, he discovers similarities between his sort of journalism and The Lives of the Saints , juxtaposing today's lurid headlines with the equally lurid and absurd martyrdoms of old. Slavitt's ( Salazar Blinks ) writing is elegant, sinister and witty, as affecting as Nabokov's, as original as Nathanael West's.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Slavitt's narrator, a tabloid journalist with too much talent and sensitivity for his job, tries to deal with the grief of his wife and child's death in a drunk-driving accident. The only solace he finds is in the writings of an 18th-century rationalist who professes that everything is random and happens for no comprehensible reason. The journalist's series on the victims of a madman's random shooting spree helps him to face some questions in his own search for meaning to his family's death. A man of varying literary styles and academic experiences, Slavitt peppers his story with obscure academic information, which is often as interesting as the story he tells.
-Martin J. Hudacs, Towanda H.S., Pa.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0689120796
• ISBN 13: 9780689120794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213