Save Me, Joe Louis - Hardcover

Bell, Madison Smartt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151794324 ISBN 13: 9780151794324

Publisher: Harcourt, 1993

Synopsis

Making their living by forcing strangers to withdraw money for them from automatic cash machines, Macrae and Charlie hook up with a Black ex-con called Porter, who teaches them the perils of an unexamined life

About this title

About the Author:

Madison Smartt Bell (b. 1957) is a critically acclaimed novelist. Over the last two decades he has produced more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews. His books have been finalists for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award among other honors. Born and raised outside of Nashville, Bell’s fiction is often set in the South, or in New York where he lived as a young writer. Bell and his wife, poet Elizabeth Spires, currently live in Baltimore, Maryland, where they are the codirectors of the writing program at Goucher College.

From Publishers Weekly:

Like a steel bearing in a pinball machine, the protagonist of Bell's new novel bounces wildly from one crime to another. Only at the end of his run, overcoming his instinct to react to circumstances rather than create them, does he seem willing to choose his own moral path. AWOL from the service and living in a New York City tenement, Macrae teams up with Charlie to rob people by forcing them to withdraw money from bank machines. As the crimes and violence escalate, they are joined by Porter, a black ex-con, in Baltimore. A botched robbery then sends them to Tennessee, where they live with Macrae's bitter blind father near Nashville and encounter Lacy, Macrae's childhood girlfriend. Another robbery results in four brutal killings and a high-speed escape to the Carolina shore. "Ain't nobody cares that much what you do," says Charlie, who uses that aphorism for license. As Macrae gradually discerns the difference between Charlie's lack of conscience and his own passivity, we come to care deeply for him. Marred by some slow spots, some heavy-handed metaphors and too many coincidences, this meticulously observed story nevertheless grips us with its lucid prose, its keen psychological insights and the author's respect for his troubled characters. Combining the lowlife urban setting and the hardscrabble rural mountain life that feature in his earlier works, Bell ( Doctor Sleep ; Soldier's Joy ) remains one of our most talented novelists.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0151794324
• ISBN 13: 9780151794324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 351