Spooner

by Pete Dexter

Book Overview

Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446540722
• ISBN13: 9780446540728
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 469 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.9" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Story that explains without explaining away

This is one of the first novels that I can wholeheartedly recommend in a long time. It combines spare details, psychological insight, and perfect comedic timing. It is truly a delight to read. The format is unusual - a set of short stories, ordered chronologically. The details and descriptions are those that are important to the characters in the scenes. There is no attempt to describe in cinematic detail the workings of the scene in question. Do not expect to learn much about Philadelphia geography or Milledgeville GA politics. I found the sparse descriptions to be a great relief. I was told everything that I needed to know to understand what struck the scene's main character(s) and nothing more. There was no need to visualize the unimportant or ponder the tangential. A word in defense of this novel against critics, who usually claim one way or or another that the novel is lacking in detail or seems unfinished: this is a writer telling a story in a colloquial fashion, like a storyteller. This book does not tell how to become Spooner. Rather it tells what it is like to be Spooner in several individual moments. Thus no character is explained away - each character retains his/her dignity. This sort of writing is unpretentious and frees the reader to laugh and ponder along with the book's characters. If you want a how-to guide that really tells you nothing, watch Batman Begins. If you want a good novel, read this book.

Uproarious and dark novel

Reviewed by Victoria Gonzales for Reader Views (11/09) Wow! This book is awesome and just fun to read! If you like the title "Spooner," then I can guarantee you will like this book. It is full of the absurdities of life, and despite being a fiction novel, it feels very real. You can recognize aspects of the characters in the people in your own life. It is like reading a complete confession of one of your close friends. You might find out more than you wanted to know, but it is fascinating all the same. Spooner is a rather strange child, and his family is just as strange as he is. Spooner's childhood is hilarious; he becomes the fiend of the neighborhood, peeing in his neighbors' shoes. His family has difficulty relating to Spooner, and sometimes resent him, but Spooner does not seem to mind. His mother decides that she loves Spooner's stillborn twin more than she loves Spooner. One of his brothers, Darrow, is very different from Spooner. Darrow is a genius, but is not good at socializing with people. The book also goes in depth with Spooner's stepfather, and his story is very poignant and a lot of people will identify with it if they have ever had to provide care for another person. Spooner accepts everything that comes to him, and is so easy-going even when strange and terrible things happen to him. After he is injured and can no longer play baseball, he has to reevaluate what he is going to do with his life. He seems to just fall into a position where he is writing at a newspaper, and marries a woman who accepts him for who he is. You will cringe at some of the things Spooner gets himself into (an awful bar fight for seemingly no reason), and cheer when things finally go right for him. "Spooner" by Pete Dexter is a guilty pleasure; it is kind of like a car crash. You know it is bad, but you look anyway because it is fascinating. I laughed out loud throughout the book; one passage that was just so absurd was a description of a hospital patient who was undergoing treatment at the same time as Spooner. Mr. Graves took very good care of his car, and when he finally allowed his wife to drive it, she panicked while he was directing her where to park, and "she scratched the bumper, not incidentally pinning Mr. Graves against the brick wall of a parking lot... she wasn't sure of what happened, but she was pretty sure from the noise he made afterwards that she'd scratched the car." You will keep reading despite Spooner's awkward nature and all the ridiculous events surrounding his life. If you are interested at all in a very honest portrayal of humanity, then I highly recommend this book.

Simply put...Great!!

Warm, touching, funny. Dexter's wonderful detail and self deprecating wit thrilled me on each and every page. I think Spooner and Calmer are two of the most wonderful characters I've met in a long, long time.

Rich in Narrative

This is one of the better books I have read in a long time. The book begins with Spooner's birth and goes through his middle years, encompassing the "highlights" of his life. Spooner is an anti-hero. Not having a great start in life, he seems to do what comes logically to him, but these actions are not usually socially, or even legally, acceptable. He is a character that one has great sympathy for. We can root for him even though he never quite lives up to our ideals. Spooner's indifference to what others think stems from his mother's indifference to him, but the author cleverly muddles this for us. We see strong glimpses of Spooner's caring in his relationship with his stepfather, Calmer, and with his relationship to his daughter. We see Spooner's life progress from his expulsion from kindergarten, to a failed trip to the baseball minor leagues because of a shattered elbow, to a nasty bar fight after a newspaper column he wrote, to writing two novels, and to finally settling down with his second wife and only daughter. We are not quite sure whether he has really lived the unremarkable and troubled life that we, the reader, are originally led to believe. This is where Dexter makes the reader think long after the book is finished. The author's in depth characterization of Spooner and his life has us rethinking the definition of success. This book is a must read if only for the very clever ending that brings the story full circle.

Fathers and Sons

In his latest novel Pete Dexter has created two unforgetable complex male characters way bigger than life. Spooner, a twin who survives, is born in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1956. His mother Lily, who may have been happy only twice in her life-- "the night JFK was elected president, and the day Richard Nixon quit the White House"-- soon loses her husband and Spooner's father Ward to a mysterious illness. A few years later she marries Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of the navy, who comes South from South Dakota, where most people "wouldn't smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize." The events in Spooner and Calmer's lives take up most of the rest of this brilliantly comic but a tad-too-long novel (466 pages). Spooner is expelled from kindergarten when he becomes sexually aroused by his female teacher, secretly urinates in the male neighbors' shoes at night, and in high school has no talent for football but relishes collisions. He eventually marries a woman in part because she is someone who would not forsake a dog and becomes a relatively successful newspaper reporter in Philadelphia-- or "staff writer" if you prefer. He is nurtured, sometimes from across the country by Calmer, who holds several thankless positions as a public school teacher over the years and finally winds up teaching English, and has the novel idea that teachers should treat students like human beings. He is, in Spooner's words, "the greatest man he ever knew" and someone whose good opinion he craved more than any other person's. A lot of other sometimes motley characters pass through the novel: the sadistic Coach Tinker from Spooner's high school; Stroop, his boss in his short stint of selling baby pictures from door to door in Florida; his boxing buddy Harry Faint. Even Margaret Truman makes a brief appearance. Of course there is Spooner's neighbor's dog Lester Maddox as well. While Dexter skewers a lot of people in SPOONER-- newspaper reporters, politicians, undertakers, school administrators with useless doctor of education degrees, he saves a lot of his wrath for two despicable characters Marlin Dodge and his boyfriend Atlas Shrugged, whom the author describes as "the same-tool set." Does he protest a little too much? Mr. Dexter's language is uniquely his own and seeps with dark humor. The scene near the beginning of the novel when Calmer totally screws up the burial of a congressman at sea is as funny as anything I have read in a very long time and is mirrored near the end of the book with more somber watery last rites. (This sort of bookends device is what makes Garrison Keillor and the rest of us English majors put our feet on the floor every morning.) This writer is the master of the lower middle-class metaphor. A character's expression is the same expression on one's face when the bottom falls out of a garbage bag. Calmer ties up the Congressman's broken casket like a "country girl's suitcase." The Congressman's widow accepts the folded flag from the h