ALONE.

Exploring the fragile web of family relationships, this chronicle of Earl Dimes, who loses everything familiar in his life--especially his son--in one act of infidelity, reveals him as he awakens to the emptiness of his emotionally guarded existence

Luminous, intense and searingly honest, Small's ( Almost Famous ) novel focuses on unacknowledged alcoholic and insomniac Earl Dimes, Pennsylvania management consultant and aspiring novelist, who concedes that he has made a mess of his life. Years ago, after his single act of infidelity, Earl's wife left him. When the story begins, he has just heard that their teenage son has died after setting himself on fire. This shattering news leads Earl to reassess his failures, a process that will gradually take him from emotional numbness to awareness as he realizes that his lifelong pattern has been to push people away while creating the cloistered emotional safety that he both cherishes and despises. Earl's reflections, his affair with a woman half his age and a subplot involving threats from a black employee whom Earl fired are rendered in memorable, dramatic scenes; sometimes, however, the transitions between them can be jarring. Although Small can invest moments of Earl's unsought enlightenment with a true comic flair, he imbues the imbroglio of Earl's life with a sadness that seeps into the reader's mind.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An earnest and occasionally hair-raising record of emotional hopes and defeats in the life of an American middle-class male, from cradle to, maybe, his final reward in a happy marriage. Like Small's other characters (in Almost Famous, 1982, and The River in Winter, 1986), Earl Dimes is born in Maine and raised in central Pennsylvania by a drunken father and a lunatic mother named Nola Nichols, who sleeps away most of her son's childhood in narcoleptic collapse. She comes to at a few crucial moments in Earl's life: when his athletic, handsome, much-favored older half-brother Richie dies in a suspicious airplane crash (the plane was carrying drugs) just as Earl is leaving for Bentham College, where he has a scholarship; when Earl's father Jack dies swiftly from cancer; and later when Earl's own son, a frail, sweet 18-year-old boy named Keefer, sets himself on fire in a suicide attempt and dies gruesomely of his burns. In between, as Nola lies on a couch in a darkened room, Earl marries into a raucous, endearing Italian-American family, taking as bride a girl he's met at college; lives despairingly as an aspiring novelist-cum-high-school teacher and then busily and affluently as a management consultant; cheats on his wife; is deserted by her; and finds that he has no access to his then-12- year-old son, whom he adores and quickly loses track of as his wife moves to California. When, years later, Nola dies, she leaves Earl nothing, telling a mutual acquaintance: ``She said you never needed anything.'' Certainly this is the impression Earl works hard to give in this (you should pardon the expression) ``men's novel''--that is, until he meets and marries Marilyn and, ceding control, lives contentedly ever after. Long-winded but affecting. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This third novel by the author of The River in Winter ( LJ 2/1/87) and Almost Famous ( LJ 6/15/82) opens with a mesmerizing sentence: "I was living alone again--had been for nearly a year--when I learned that my kid had set himself on fire." This simple declaration embodies the blend of loneliness and tortured relationships that has marked Earl Dimes's life. Earl, the author of one novel, becomes a successful business consultant. His story describes the seriocomic events of his life and its people up to and just beyond his son's suicide. Earl's mother, stepfather, wife, and father-in-law figure prominently in these events. Small has crafted a novel in which both narrative and language are merged into a powerful reading experience. Highly recommended for serious fiction collections.
- A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.