Coast To Coast - Hardcover

Frederic Raphael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752804561 ISBN 13: 9780752804569

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

Marion and Barnaby Pierce are a New England couple in their sixties who are selling their house and driving to Los Angeles to attend their son’s wedding, give him Barnaby’s vintage Jaguar, and then go their separate ways. On their journey, they pick at each other’s weaknesses and betrayals with an edgy mixture of humor and cruelty. This is a bittersweet study of chagrin in which love, hatred, and self-loathing fuel rapid-fire dialogue and wit.

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From Publishers Weekly

"It's not a tragedy. It's not quite a comedy. My agent would not be surprised to discover that we're having difficulty placing it." It's also how late-middle-aged sit-com writer Barnaby Pierce describes his fraught marriage, and the way that the prolific British writer Raphael vicariously names the hybrid genre of his own serio-comic antiromance. Told mainly through the snapping, sparring dialogue between Barnaby and his wife, Marion, as they travel from New York to California in a '67 Jag, the novel maps the course of their life together. In crisis, the two reveal and revenge each other's infidelities, discussing divorce even as they make their way cross-country to attend their son's wedding in the vehicle they plan to give him as a nuptial gift. In jest, the couple is verbally dexterous and almost flirtatious, ? la Beatrice and Benedict; in anger, each is ruthlessly ad hominem. Barnie scorns Marion's desire for separationAyet there is real pathos in his provocative insistence that she doesn't love him anymoreAas he struggles to find ways of keeping her in his life. Jealousies run deep: Marion slept with Barnie's best friend, Hal, with whom they stay on their way west; Barnie had an affair with a woman close to Marion. And of their four children, one has died, another is estranged from the family, yet another has surprised her rather conservative family with a black boyfriend. Playing push-me pull-you over even the most minor decisions, the couple recycle arguments in the terrifyingly relentless way of the truly intimateAso accurately, in fact, that some may find the lack of forward motion frustrating. Raphael's ear is pitched acutely to American speech, but the ferocious energy of the dialogue cannot carry the novel by itself; each episode remains a brilliant set piece in a linked dramatic structure. Already published and well-received in Britain, where Raphael is widely known, the novel succeeds as a graph of human volatility and a measure of a relationship's resilience. (May) FYI: Raphael's screenplay for Darling won an Oscar and his classic road-trip romance, Two for the Road, received a nomination. Most recently, he has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the already big-buzz forthcoming film, Eyes Wide Shut.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0752804561
• ISBN 13: 9780752804569
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231