Alligator

by Lisa Moore

Book Overview

Lisa Moore's wickedly fresh first novel--a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year--moves with the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802170250
• ISBN13: 9780802170255
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

One of a kind

Every aspiring writer should read this book to learn how to create fascinating, believable characters. Splendid, unique voice. Full of perception. Highly recommended.

Destined for Newfie Lit 101

Newfoundland has a certain mild fascination, sitting there right in the center of things and yet remote and cimmerian. We look down on it sometimes, as we fly between London and New York and wonder what it's like down there. In Anne Proulx's "Shipping News" and in the Vinland sagas everything is a little weird, but Lisa Moore's "Alligator" makes it sound a fairly normal piece of North America. People live in condominiums or suburban houses rather than wooden shacks or earth huts. They eat radicchio and sleep on futons and have their tongues pierced just like everyone else. Most of the local color is in a movie that Madeleine, one of the characters is producing, set in the 1820's about an archbishop making sure that churches have the proper chalices and making soup for his mother. Madeleine is suffering from chest pains and her sister Beverly is suffering from a tree-hugging promiscuous alligator-loving daughter, Colleen.Newfoundland's not a great place for alligator watchers so Colleen runs off to Louisiana with money she steals from Frank. Frank has a one night stand with Colleen but it mostly worried about his hot dog stand and what to do with his mother's ashes (all the males are upset by losing mothers) and by trying to avoid the depredations of Valentin, the nasty Russian who is having an affair with Isabel, who is acting in Madeleine's movie. The story is told MPOV with separate chapters for each POV. There is some excellent writing, as in the quote in the New York Times review that led me to buy this. In fact it's amongst the best Newfoundland novels I've read so far this year.

Newfoundland novel explores the effects of grief on character

It's present-day St. John's, Newfoundland, a summer when the elm spanner worms (think gypsy moths at their very worst) munch their way through the trees, dropping disgustingly onto passersby. Colleen, a 17-year-old would-be eco-terrorist, starts things off, downloading beheadings off the Internet while thumbing through "Cosmo." Then we meet Frank, a 19-year-old hot dog stand owner, newly out on his own after his mother's death. He is as hardworking, focused, sweet and lonely as Colleen is aimless, angry, and loved. Then there's Madeleine, Colleen's glamorous, aging aunt, a film producer driven to finish her magnum opus before her weak heart kills her, and her sister Beverly, Colleen's mother, a tower of strength who's at her wit's end. Lastly we meet two secondary characters, Valentin, a Russian thug, as he likes to think of himself, and Isobel, Valentin's lover and the fading star of Madeleine's film. Canadian author Lisa Moore's first novel moves from character to character, changing points of view with each brief chapter, sometimes moving from third to first person and shifting tenses from past to present. Grief, the sort of grief that changes the course of life, preoccupies all of them. Colleen and Beverly still mourn the death of David, step-dad and husband, four years dead, while Frank thinks vividly of his mother's lingering cancer death and his awful, solitary vigil. And Madeleine still misses the husband she left 30 years before (and now talks to nightly while his pregnant young wife sleeps). Valentin mourns his lost, harsh childhood and Isobel mulls her regrets. But this is not a dark or depressing novel - it's too full of energy and life. And Moore employs an adroit, dry humor to delineate character. Beverly, who talks to strangers easily, advises a man on a Christmas present: "'Is she a stay-at-home Mom?' Beverly felt a mild disdain for women who gave up careers with the excuse of raising children when most normal people could do both, but she felt guilty about the opinion, and often claimed to be envious." Madeleine, assessing yet another young romantic prospect: "Trevor Barker's apartment was in the same condo as Madeleine's on Military Road and was all coarse fibers and bran-coloured. It makes her worry about what he will cook." Moore, twice a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize (for this novel and for the short story collection, "Open"), writes intense, precise and anecdotal prose. Her characters roil with strong emotions, which sometimes impel them to act and other times are tamped or subsumed by will. There's an edgy energy to this first novel, making the reader aware that anything can happen at any moment, some of it prompted by human action, some just unavoidable fate, like David's aneurysm or Frank's mother's cancer or Valentin's ruthless opportunism. Each of her characters has learned this lesson, some better than others. Colleen steals a bottle of vodka and tries to return it for a bottle of wine just to see what