Jerry Engels: A Novel - Hardcover

Rogers, Thomas

3.33

21 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590511492 ISBN 13: 9781590511497

Publisher: Other Press, 2005

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Visit Thomas Rogers's author website at otherpress.com/thomasrogers.

In this sequel to At the Shores, Jerry Engels is now a junior at Penn State College, living in a second-rate fraternity, failing the courses in his major, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, and thinking about women, sex, and love. Since losing the rich, beautiful, and kind Rosalind Ingleside in his last year of high school, he has had four girlfriends and slept with dozens of other women, including wild, hard-bitten, and married women he has encountered in the small towns of central Pennsylvania.

When the novel opens, he has just lost Pat Gaheris, a gorgeous sorority girl, whom he infected with crabs. Soon he begins to pass the time with Anne, an unattractive and inexperienced art student, who suspects she is a lesbian. Enter Elizabeth, Jerry's Freshman Composition teacher. After a chance meeting one weekend at a ski resort, they seem likely to go their separate ways. But, in the novel's decisive scenes, Jerry refuses to let her drop him, while the well-educated, ambitious, and divorced Elizabeth discovers, to the reader's surprise as well as her own, that she is drawn to her handsome and attentive student. In the end, Jerry chooses to embrace a life given purpose and shape by desire.

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About the Author:

Thomas Rogers

Thomas Rogers is Professor Emeritus of English at Penn State. His previous novels are The Pursuit of Happiness, The Confessions of a Child of the Century, and At the Shores.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Rogers first introduced "erotic pantheist" Jerry Engels in his marvelous 1980 novel, At the Shores, in which Jerry, a 17-year old Chicagoan, lost his virginity to a bleary prostitute and botched an honest attempt to drown himself in Lake Michigan after a failed romance. In this, the winsome second installment of his ineluctable Bildungsroman, Jerry is a 21-year-old junior at Penn State. Rather than study, however, Jerry eagerly digests the Kinsey Report (the novel is set in 1951 and 1952), floats around with his frat brothers, pumps iron, composes amateur verse and poses a nude model for a campus art class. Of course he also chases women, including a Philadelphia hooker who gives him crabs, a confused lesbian, his buddy's vulnerable younger sister and Elizabeth Grant, his blustery freshman English professor with whom things eventually get quite serious. Irresponsibly confident yet enviably cocksure, Jerry lets his own heart guide him, publicly ignoring well-established legal, social and sexual mores. To Rogers's credit, however, Jerry rarely stinks like a sordid letch. And though it's somewhat hard to believe in an adolescent male who so audaciously fetes sex (even homoerotic encounters) during the Truman years, Rogers-who is still vastly underappreciated-nonetheless manages to suspend our disbelief with a superb comic vision of a shameless, harmless, lovable lothario who refuses to inherit the world's cynicism and who, foolishly or not, is his own man.

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