The Loop

Coomer, Joe

ISBN 10: 0571129498 / ISBN 13: 9780571129492

Published by Faber & Faber, Boston, 1993

About this Item

Description: This copy is Signed by the author. Dust jacket design by Lorna Stovall; ;jacket art by Christine Haberstock. ''Joe Coomer's eccentric fourth novel features two unlikely loners. First is thirty year old Lyman, who works the night shift as a courtesy patrolman on the highway that circles Forth Worth, Texas. Lyman's off-duty existence is no less of a loop. Hardened from a childhood as an orphan and convinced that the world is an arbitrary place, he limits his daytime routine to an unending series of such practical college courses as plumbing, aeronautics and sign language. If life makes no sense, he can at least be prepared for all its eventualities. But nothing could have prepared him for the dramatic entrance to his life of the second loner -- a ninety year old parrot.'' BINDING/CONDITION: blue binding with cloth at the spine; a Fine book, with a Fine dust jacket; publisher's price on the jacket flap is intact. 8vo (8.5 inches tall). 201 pages.

Seller Inventory # 069775

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Loop
• Publisher: Faber & Faber, Boston
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571129498
• ISBN 13: 9780571129492
• Binding: Hardbound
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • General Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Lyman, a thirty-year-old night patrolman on a Fort Worth highway, convinced that his pet, a parrot with a complicated history, holds a vital message for him, sits in the library researching its past--and romancing the librarian.

Reviews

The protagonist of Coomer's deliciously quirky and perceptive fourth novel (after A Flatland Fable ) is Lyman, 30, a lovable loner (he has never known his parents) who works nights for the Texas highway department, driving around the Loop that circles Fort Worth. In this dark, endless orbit--a subtly shifting metaphor for Lyman's own life--he aids stranded motorists, collects debris for his trophy collection and buries animals killed by cars. When an aging but spry parrot with a beakful of cryptic sayings barges through the screen door of Lyman's trailer and upsets his routine, Lyman's deeper humanity is oddly stirred. He decides that finding "the owner behind the bird . . . would be akin to finding the message behind the universe." To this end he enlists the aid of Fiona, a sexy librarian at the college where he has enrolled in a potpourri of courses from French to furniture repair. Together, they research parrots and try to track the sources of the bird's perplexingly hieratic utterances. The quest turns up surprises, not always the answers Lyman thinks he seeks. Increasingly when he returns to the nocturnal exitless Loop, he sees his beloved highway in a new light as a place of "aridity" and estrangement. Despite a jarringly abrupt switch to Fiona's viewpoint late in the narrative, the denouement both heartens and satisfies.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.