Jernigan - Hardcover

Gates, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679402373 ISBN 13: 9780679402374

Publisher: Knopf, 1991

Synopsis

First edition of author's first book. Fine/Fine. Pulitzer Prize finalist.

About this title

Reviews

Peter Jernigan is an LSD-popping alcoholic whose drunken wife killed herself in a bizarre accident. Living on gin and irony, taking refuge in Wallace Stevens or William Burroughs, he gets fired from his job in New York City but almost manages to convince himself that he's a responsible father to his confused teenage son, Danny, a rock guitarist. Jernigan's emotional numbness continues when he moves in with Martha, a single mother who raises rabbits in the basement of her New Jersey home, then shoots and devours them. The action in this depressing first novel is framed by a Fourth of July and a white Christmas. But instead of all-American families we get adolescent suicide, wife beating, addiction, divorce and a powerful portrait of two generations unable to communicate with each other. Gates's tale lags in momentum as his self-pitying narrator, insisting that he's functional even as he increasingly loses touch with reality, fails to confront the guilt, rage and self-hate lurking within himself.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Well conceived and well written, this book examines the tragedy of a man whose life epitomizes failure on every level. A victim of circumstances, Peter Jernigan is now emotionally crippled and psychologically impoverished. His already distorted personal relationships, skewed further by a dependency on alcohol, sweep him forward, with horrifying swiftness, into a nightmarish cycle of failure, loss, and spiritual death. Bright but unsuccessful, Jernigan drifts through a bleak life that only becomes worse. He has lost his father and wife in successive accidents and now must deal with the adolescent traumas of his only son. His encounter with the divorced mother of his son's girlfriend promises to lighten his life but instead complicates it even further. A disturbing first novel, Jernigan will cause readers, especially men, to shake their complacency and perhaps reevaluate their own circumstances.
- Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679402373
• ISBN 13: 9780679402374
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 237