The Man Who Loved Levittown (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) - Hardcover

Wetherell, W. D.

4.12

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780822935209: The Man Who Loved Levittown (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822935201 ISBN 13: 9780822935209

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

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This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell’s stories a suburban retiree’s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.

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About the Author:

W. D. Wetherell has published a novel, Souvenirs, and a book of essays, Vermont River. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many national magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. He has twice won O. Henry Awards and has been awarded an NEA fellowship in fiction.

From Library Journal:

McGarry, Jean. Airs of Providence. Johns Hopkins. (Poetry & Fiction Series). Nov. 1985. c.130p. LC 85-8905. ISBN 0-8018-2909-7. $12.95. Wetherell, W.D. The Man Who Loved Levittown. Univ. of Pittsburgh Pr. Nov. 1985. c.145p. LC 85-1172. ISBN 0-8229-3520-1. $12.95. f Good stories offer a detailed map of secret, interior territories. For McGarry the territory mapped is an Irish, Catholic, working-class parish in Providence, R.I. Her characters begin or end here. Some of the stories deal with the same characters: two sisters, Margery and April, and their parents. In an early story the girls are young, in the last story about them April is in college and Margery is preparing for her wedding. An accumulation of telling detail presents the texture, the confinement, and especially the language of this world. In Wetherell's collection (winner of the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize) people are caught in a moment of internal or external disaster: a man sets fire to the house he loves; a boy rejects the mindless optimism of his grandfather; in a tennis game, an adult brother and sister battle to dominate the family. In the title story (an O'Henry prizewinner) a World War II vet buys a house in Levittown where he spends the best years of his life. His wife has died, his grown children have left, and one by one his neighbors are selling out and moving to Florida. Beneath the talky, narrative voice of this story you discover the internal logic of a man pushed beyond reason to a desperate act. Burke's stories (he has also written four novels) seem inevitable, style and content superbly merged. In ``Uncle Sidney and the Mexicans'' a young man, out of school for the summer, is picking tomatoes with a partly Mexican crew. The boy learns about honor, learns how to differentiate between accepted prejudice and his own inner feelings. In ``Losses'' a young boy must learn to accept and forgive the human weakness hidden behind adult authority. Any one or all three collections would be a good addition to contemporary story collections. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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