Foley's Luck: Stories - Hardcover

Chiarella, Tom

4

16 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679409653 ISBN 13: 9780679409656

Publisher: Knopf, 1992

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Eleven stories trace the life of Dan Foley, from his childhood as the son of a mortician to his adult life as a husband, father, and architect

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A first collection of 11 interrelated stories--about the coming of age and failure-ridden adulthood of a narcissistic Florida architect unable to finish anything. We meet Dan Foley in ``Foley's Escape Story'' when he experiences his ``first removal'' and embalming of a body with his undertaker father. ``Foley's Life Story'' takes this would-be hero to the University of Florida, where Foley's penchant to make things up, or to lie, about his life in order to improve upon it, reveals a pattern that will emerge more fully in later stories such as ``Rapture,'' in which Foley ``decides to do something about his lying'' before getting mixed up with an old man and a pumpkin and lying again. In ``Foley's Confessions,'' he meets his future wife, Grace, and spies on her, resulting in a catastrophe, but by ``Foley's Luck,'' he is married with children, bemoaning the day he killed a fox with his Chevy as the day his luck turned. Obsessed, he keeps a list of unlucky events until he has nearly driven his wife crazy and his friends away. In ``Foley's Motto,'' then, Grace has had enough of Foley's starts and stops. The two separate, and Foley begins a new life, one no more satisfying to him than the old one. In ``Foley's Avenger,'' his daughter runs off to a man, and Foley goes after her, once again reduced to voyeurism by story's end. Finally, in ``Foley the Great,'' Chiarella allows his hero a chance to tie up some loose ends and, famished for intimacy and closure, a chance to understand that, as an architect at least, he did manage to finish some things. The gimmicky structure wears thin, but, at best, a heartbreaking look at certain dramatized paucities of modern life. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

An existential sadness pervades this affecting first collection of interlinked stories, which chronicle a man's attempts to take control of his life and his defeat at destiny's firm hands. We meet Dan Foley as a youngster accompanying his undertaker father "on removal," during which he learns that death can reveal terrible secrets. In his subsequent misadventures, some inherently more dramatic than others, he grows up to become a Florida architect and the father of two children, yet still feels distant from his own experience. In "Foley Returns" a criminal cousin reaches across the years to remind Dan that the "old routes of comfort" and the "soothing geography" of family relations can simply disappear. But lessons always come too late, and he persists in trying to manipulate his fate. "Foley's Motto" shows him attempting to adhere to such vague maxims as "love something" and "expect nothing," only to find that destiny has another idea--in this instance, divorce. Chiarella, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker , sets forth these hard truths in unvarnished, seemingly artless prose that assumes transcendent power.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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