Three Dollars - Hardcover

Perlman, Elliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1878448889 ISBN 13: 9781878448880

Publisher: MacMurray & Beck, 1999

Synopsis

Winner of The Age Book of the Year in Australia, Three Dollars is about Eddie, an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of thirty-eight, with a wife, a child, and three dollars. At any other time the world would have smiled on him. But this is the nineties and the world values other things. A brilliantly deft and poignant portrait of a man attempting to retain his humanity, his family, and his sense of humor in a corporate world.

About this title

About the Author

Elliot Perlman was born in 1964. His work has appeared in various publications including Picador New Writing 3 and Faber First Fictions. In 1994 he won The Age Short Story Competition for The Reasons I Won't Be Coming. He lives in Melbourne, Australia where he works as a barrister.

Reviews

One of Australia's acclaimed young writers, first novelist Perlman explores the conundrums of conscience in one man's desire to understand his place as a husband, father and complicated human being amid late capitalism's ever-escalating pressure. Idealistic, intelligent Eddie Harnovey, a 38-year-old chemical engineer, tells his life story from boyhood through college years to the present. Eddie's narrative revolves largely around the women in his life: his childhood love, the beautiful, privileged Amanda, pops into his world every nine and a half years to bewilder him; his brilliant wife, Tanya, a passionate, quixotic academic, is plagued by bouts of depression; their precocious daughter, Abby, raises the stakes on every decision Eddie makes. After a soulful, progressive youth, Eddie has wound up working for a government agency in Melbourne, where he struggles to maintain his integrity and provide for his family in an increasingly hostile corporate world. When he loses his job, he finds himself with only three dollars to his name, about to lose his house and on the edge of terror. He gets survival lessons from an unexpected source, and then, after brute accident and violence signal the end for him, salvation occurs because of his own previous decency and kindness. Eddie's blend of self-deprecating wit, caustic social comment, spirited sensitivity and big heart carries the narrative in beautifully controlled passages that brim with insight, humor and feeling. His world is rich with the pleasures and pains of love, family, friendship and marriage, and the supporting characters in this prize-winning narrative are smart and likable; some are unabashedly erudite, facilitating entertaining philosophical debate. Perlman's sheer storytelling virtuosity gives this essentially domestic tale the narrative drive of a thriller and the unforgettable radiance of a novel that accurately reflects essential human values. (June) FYI: Melbourne's newspaper The Age awarded this novel its best fiction award for 1998, and named it as the Best Book of the Year. It also won the Best Book of the Year award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Australian Perlmans debut is a slow-starter, but its final third bracingly chronicles one male's stunned, compelling flail along the slippery slope to unearned poverty. Named Book of the Year in 1998 by The Age (an Australian periodical), the tale of Eddie Harnovey plays out in Melbourne, though hes clearly an Everyman of the West. In an intelligent, bitterly funny voice, he recalls his college training and early liaisons with Amanda, the daughter of a wealthy magnate, and with Tanya, his future wife. His father, mother, and sister also appear, but only an account of an uncles death resonates with considerable power. Perlmans prose (and his story) really take off, though, once the spadework of personal background has been performed. Eddie becomes an environmental scientist with the government and marries the alluring, brilliant Tanya. As she struggles to complete a Ph.D. in economic history, hes assigned to write an impact statement on the Spensers Gulf refinery, a hoary, illegal complex owned by Amanda's father. Eddie and Tanya acquire the expected burdens and responsibilities (a mortgaged house, an unreliable car, the divorce of a couple close to them) and a beloved daughter, Abby. In quick succession, Abby becomes ill, Tanya makes her contribution to her family's history of depression, and Eddie finds the project entangling him in a thicket of jealousies and resentments that ultimately close him out of a job. But the shallow story of a virtuous hero swallowed by a faceless culture of greed is magnificently interwoven with Eddie's domestic and social concerns, giving the novel a delightful richness and tragic power. Creating a sophisticated, subtle voiceat times comic, elegiac, or philosophicthat intelligently and un-ironically wrestles with the battlements of 20th-century fortunes, Perlman shows himself to be a gifted writer of considerable promise. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The narrator of Perlman's first novel is a man at odds with himself and the world around him. Eddie Harnovey is an idealistic liberal thinker living a conservative, middle-class life. He's an honest man struggling to choose between telling the truth or keeping quiet. His wife suffers from severe depression, his daughter may be epileptic, and his closest friends are getting divorced, but Eddie's mantra is still "Everything is going to be okay." What takes Eddie from an inquisitive, impressionable young boy wanting to make a difference in the world to a beaten man standing on the street in a torn suit with only three dollars is a mix of fate, free will, and a laissez-faire attitude. Perlman, in a stream-of-consciousness style, uses Eddie as a mouthpiece to sound off on a number of topics, from the Australian bush to Elvis. Tempering criticism with humor, Perlman deftly and confidently explores a world that can be harsh and unforgiving but also full of hope. Carolyn Kubisz

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When I got home, Tanya was out. I deposited my luggage in the bedroom, threw the laundry in the washing machine and went to check the mail. There was a letter from the bank. Tanya was right. Interest rates had gone up to seventeen and a half percent. It was not just talk. There it was in black and white signed by a machine impersonating the signature of a highly placed bank official we had never met. They had actually started charging us the higher rate ten days earlier but there had been a delay in getting the letters out and the bank apologised unreservedly. The cost of the letter would doubtless be absorbed by the increase. Underneath the signature the bank had decided to place a message of encouragement:

By depositing your savings in a loan trimmer plan account you have reduced your loan interest by $1.71.

The mail contained advertisements: for a new gym specialising in fitness for men and women, home-delivered pizza from Cyprus, the Good News Bible, an encyclopaedia of entomology and a letter from our local member of parliament with a range of handy hints that would have Tanya fuming and vowing to put him in a home before the next election. Although he had misspelt our names, I had no reason to doubt the genuineness of everything he said. It was his belief that Tanya and I, as a household, could save up to a hundred and sixty dollars a year in energy by sealing gaps around doors and windows, using heavy curtains and maintaining our heaters regularly. We had only one heater so perhaps we would have to revise down this estimate but it was, nonetheless, a salutary reminder of the economic advantages of maintaining our heater.

He also recommended Tanya and I undertake regular fire drills replete with an escape plan that has been followed blindfold by everyone in the family at least once prior to the time of an actual fire. There was no mention of the government's slashing of funding for education but he did remind us that he could arrange messages and telegrams for residents in the electorate celebrating a special occasion such as a fiftieth wedding anniversary, or, for those celebrating one hundredth birthdays, a message from the Queen and Governor-General. Without an escape plan or blindfold we decided to try to have children.

Paul and Kate got married completely unexpectedly. His family had decided that the great virtue in denying him thus far his share of their not inconsiderable assets would soon ripen and then rot into a collective clannish shame. He had reached in their eyes the stage of life where the state of his furniture and the age of his car was a reflection on them. The first sprinkling of their largesse, in the form of Paul and Kate's wedding, was a public tribute to the purity of their sound business sense and sternly gentle cash-register-side manner over two generations of pharmaceutical service to the good people of Hawthorn, Camberwell and Mont Albert. With the assistance of the family's long-standing and now fragile vicar, and allusions to ideologies I was confident Paul had always rejected, they were married in the presence of two hundred and fifty people at a particularly fashionable bend in the Yarra River.

Paul had two brothers and so, although I could not escape the bridal party altogether, I was not required to make a speech that steered that fine line between deference to the vicar and deference to the macho success with women de rigueur for the groom, a success Paul had not known. In truth, he was lucky to be marrying Kate. As much as I liked him, she was better. Tanya knew this too but was kind enough never to make me have to hear it. Despite her fondness for him, I think Tanya always suspected something about him, something not wholly admirable. She was asked to be Kate's matron of honour and we were hoping that by the time of their wedding Tanya's belly would be swollen with child and we could insinuate an inelegance into the proceedings. But having spent so many months trying unsuccessfully, Tanya seemed about as likely to get pregnant as win the Eurovision song contest. So both of us looked on by the river, barren and speechless, as Paul and Kate with the stroke of a platitude and an injection of pharmaceutical funds, lapped us in one go and flowed with ease and prosperity into the hardening arteries of middle-class matrimony.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacMurray & Beck
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1878448889
• ISBN 13: 9781878448880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 358