Fair Warning: A Novel - Softcover

Butler, Robert Olen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802139566 ISBN 13: 9780802139566

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

Synopsis

Fair Warning is acclaimed novelist Robert Olen Butler's enthralling glimpse into a Manhattan auction house that caters to the shopping pheromones of the rich and powerful. At age forty, the company's charismatic star employee, Amy Dickerson, is capable of selling a Renoir painting of a pudgy nude for twice its value. Her customers are intoxicated by the objects they covet. And sometimes, such as when the dark and mysterious Trevor locks eyes with Amy as she closes an auction with "fair warning," that object is Amy herself. Selected as a Book Sense 76 title and as a New York Times Summer Reading title, "[Fair Warning] is as frank and sassy as its heroine." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe "Engaging ... fascinating ... accompanied by the wealth of evocative detail one might expect from a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize." -- Les Standiford, The Miami Herald "Once again, [Butler's] language is right on the money in this alternately witty and moving meditation on value and values." -- Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor "Butler has created one of the more fascinating female protagonists in recent history." -- Kirkus Reviews "Fair Warning deserves our praise, but its author also deserves our gratitude, for his continued risk-taking and stubbornly singular sensibility." -- Todd Kliman, The Washington Post

About this title

Review

Writers should be wary of titles that can be used against them. Fair Warning is just what the reader may need when considering this sparkling but featherweight depiction of the auction world. In his 11th novel, celebrated writer Robert Olen Butler explores the allure of possession. Amy Dickerson is a charismatic and penetrating auctioneer, the star of her New York auction house, who feels as comfortable flirting from the podium as extolling the virtues of a minor Rembrandt nude. Needless to say, she's slender, rich, and beautiful. Enter Alain Bouchard, the charming, well-educated, and too-good-to-be-true Frenchman who is buying her auction house--and trying to acquire Amy too. Although there are some lovely passages in Fair Warning, and it avoids the stock romantic ending that it appears to lean toward, Butler relies too much on the glamour of great wealth. Ultimately, he ends up short-changing the reader. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Robert Olen Butler is the author of ten novels and two collections of stories. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and a National Magazine Award in 2001, both for fiction, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and an NEA grant, as well as the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802139566
• ISBN 13: 9780802139566
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225