Stardog - Hardcover

DK Publishing; Driscoll, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0789426269 ISBN 13: 9780789426260

Publisher: Dk Pub, 2000

Synopsis

If Earl Patrick Godfrey can only make it across the bridge, there is a woman waiting. She calls herself Miranda Mtn., is double-jointed, tattooed from toes to navel, and has one blue eye, one brown. She's nothing like Diane, Earl's ex, whose voice of conscience he's been trying to escape since he stole the Ranchero 500 he lost to her in the divorce settlement. Earl just wants to take the "half car, half pickup" for one last sentimental spin to the Chippewa casino near the Michigan/Canada border and risk everything, one last time, in hopes of striking it rich.
Miranda Mtn., a dealer at the casino, slips him a straight flush worth twelve thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars (after taxes) and then passes him a tight-folded, red-lettered note. "Check into Ojibway Hotel - rm. 411. Your name: Johnny Ace."
But there are ways and then there are ways of hitting it big, including some delirious sex in a beach house on Cape May, a wild night of roulette in Atlantic City, and a pistol-punctuated Thanksgiving (for Miranda's past stalks her as resolutely as Earl's past stalks him). With a comic/tragic urgency that both tantalizes and delights, Earl Patrick Godfrey speeds headlong into a surprising and final starlit scene of breath-stopping mystery and redemption. It's here, after a thousand dangerous and hilarious road miles - where all the voices of advice and complaint are finally silenced - that he has the last best word.

About this title

Reviews

Driscoll's ironic but meandering follow-up to his well-received first novel, Lucky Man, Lucky Woman, charts the exploits of Earl Patrick Godfrey, an antihero so self-destructive that he makes Nicholas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas look like a paragon of sober-minded restraint and stability. Earl could be the poster boy for Underachievers Anonymous: an ex-college athlete with a near-genius-level I.Q., he's done everything in his power to booze his way into a state of perpetual oblivion ("Nothing there," he reflects in a typically self-deprecating aside, "but a once potentially brilliant mind decomposing to leaf mold"). Waking up one Michigan morning, suffused by a crushing sense of purposelessness, Earl decides to "borrow" the sports car that his ex-wife took from him in their divorce settlement and light out for parts unknown. Along the way, he gets involved with the seductive Miranda Mountain, a card-dealing, drug-running high school dropout who's supposed to be provocatively enigmatic, but who seldom registers as anything more than an improbably articulate cipher. Their aimless cross-country peregrinations finally come to a head when they become the targets of an outsized thug named JoMo. Suddenly, what has heretofore been a bitter, desultory examination of contemporary alienation and self-loathing degenerates into a pseudo-noirish farce, replete with such snarled dialogue as "stay loose, increase your shelf life" and "You hold or you fold. It's your choice." Driscoll does have talent: when he uses various imagined voices, like those of Earl's shrink and his one-time detox doctor, to underscore the minute shifts in Earl's psyche, he pulls it off with grace and delicacy. Unfortunately, artificial-sounding dialogue, a general lack of narrative tension and poorly defined supporting characters relegate this novel to the realm of underachieving sophomore efforts. (May)

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dk Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0789426269
• ISBN 13: 9780789426260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256