Walking Papers

John Grape, still living the glory of his one great novel, loses his wife and money and takes a zany, perverse, and pleasure-seeking ride that lands him happily right back where he started

Cronley's protagonist John Grape is a writer who has had his season of glory after his novel Unnatural Causes became a bestseller and then a popular movie starring Robert Redford. But, when this chronicle begins, Grape has been reduced to a walking cave-in after a calamitous change in fortune. A blood-curdling divorce settlement has stripped him of a large share of his bank account and his idyllic Connecticut home and quarantined him from his pretty, impressionable, artist-wife, who still retains a lien on his affections. Meanwhile, a receding hairline and an expanding waistline, a galloping gambling habit and a wrenching writer's block only help to send him careening into a spiritual free-fall. Landing in Las Vegas, Grape manages to reverse his losing streak by hitting it big at the tables. Buoyed by the windfall, he decides literally to exorcise his old image and remake himself into a new man through plastic surgery, a crash conditioning course and a radical change in attitude. Under the camouflage of his new identity, the born-again Lothario heads east to win back the affections of his estranged soul mate. His ignoble fall from grace also proves his ticket back into the literary big time; his account of his lacerating experiences becomes a hot cinematic property. Written in a breakneck and breezy fashion, this novel by the author of Funny Farm is sporadically amusing although often juvenile in its humor. Furthermore, Cronley's mannered prosecomposed principally of abrupt, one-sentence, newspaper-style paragraphsbecomes irritating, serving only to underline the glib characterizations and plotting.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Writer's block. Obesity. Too many drinks, too many cigarettes. Encroaching middle age. And a daughter who is flunking out of college. What else could go wrong for John Grape? He finds himself parted with his wife and much of their money as she sets off, first to Europe, to realize herself as an artist. Surely, Grape's only way out is up. This comic novel, perceptive in its portraits of the "characters" present in all our lives, pokes fun at contemporary times and our society's obsession with remaking ourselves over and over again. Grape's quest for a new self takes him from a fat farm in Arizona to ballet and voice lessons and plastic surgery in LA, and back to the East Coast, where he woos his ex-wife. The ending, with a twist, is up for various interpretations. One could be that we do seem to get what we want. But the larger meaning may be that, self-improvement aside, often we are lovable because of our flaws, not in spite of them. Recommended. Michelle Lodge , New York City
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.