A Good Man - Hardcover

Larry Baker

3.93

45 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888160446 ISBN 13: 9781888160444

Publisher: Ice Cube Books, 2009

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Harry Ducharme is at the end of his rope. Booze and bad decisions have taken him from the A-list of talk radio fame down to a tiny cinder-block station, WWHD, in St. Augustine, Florida. He talks, mostly to himself, from 10 PM to 2 AM. Not sure anybody is listening, reading books and poetry that he likes, not caring if anyone agrees with him, playing golden-oldies from the Sixties, and wondering how he got there. Above all, he s convinced he is not a good man. Then, as a hurricane pounds north Florida, Harry gets a visitor. An old black man who calls himself Peter Prophet, announcing the imminent arrival of a New Child of God. Harry is a bit skeptical. Harry is surrounded by men and women with their own burdens to carry. Captain Jack Tunnel is the morning host, more right-wing than Rush, with a cranky parrot co-host named Jimmy Buffett, but who also has a gentle secret life. Nora James is the mysterious cooking woman who broadcasts from her home kitchen, but whom nobody has ever seen. Harry falls in love with Nora because of her voice and spends his first year in town trying to find her, only to discover that her whereabouts are a communal secret, revealed only to a select few. Carlos Friedmann has the 2 6 AM slot, a fourth-generation Jewish Cuban who cannot speak Spanish, but whose forte is to broadcast fake interviews with Fidel Castro. Harry's role in the New Child s arrival eventually becomes intertwined with politics, Iraq, 9/11, old-time religion, and classic American literature from writers like Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson, as well as the music of Harry Chapin. A good man is always hard to find, but Harry Ducharme finally succeeds as he meets the New Child of God in a final and unforgettable scene of death and redemption.

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About the Author:

Larry Baker is the author of two previous novels: The Flamingo Rising (Knopf ), which was adapted by Hallmark for a television movie, and Athens, America.

Review:

Larry Baker's A Good Man updates the world of Flannery O'Connor s characters through the Bush years and into the age of Obama. Fans of O'Connor s fiction will be intrigued by Baker s imaginative reunion, in the home of the fountain of youth, of Bevel Summers with a very grown-up Harry from O'Connor s The River. Without imitating O'Connor, Baker does serious honor to her legacy. --Marshall Bruce Gentry, Editor, Flannery O'Connor Review, Georgia College & State University

To read A Good Man, is to drift once again down the river of American literature we've come to love, and what a ride: fraught with fun peril and inhabited by an exotic cast of characters, each one laced with utterly convincing amounts of turmoil, hilarity, and regret. Nora James is irresistible a triumphant achievement. But most of all you ll be drawn to Harry Ducharme. Why? Because his regrets will haunt you, his concerns will pain you, and his actions, ultimately, will take your breath away. --Patrick Ryan, author, Send Me

In Harry Ducharme, the hero of A Good Man>/b>, Larry Baker has created a main character as memorable and complex as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe. Not since Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors have we been this privy to the troubled soul of a disc jockey. Fans of Baker s previous novels won t be disappointed while readers new to his work will be bowled over. --John McNally, author, Ghosts of Chicago and The Book of Ralph

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