Aug 14 2009
Any More “Calmer” and I’d Have Fallen Asleep
I tried. I really did. I’ve said before that I hate like hell to give up on a book once I’ve started it. Finish it and hate, but not just quit. And I used to love Pete Dexter, which makes this case all the more irksome. Dexter wrote a column for my local paper, the Sacramento Bee, and his earlier books are clever and quirky and entertaining, as was his column. My memory being as pathetic as it is, I’m also left wondering if I loved Pete Dexter the way I loved Stephen King or–god forbid–V.C.Andrews–with the less discriminating palate of my youth. I think not. I think maybe this latest effort of Dexter’s just sucks a little. Or maybe a lot. For me, a lot.
Spooner, is described as a story about two men who are polar opposites, a man called Calmer Ottosson, and the strange and troubled boy that becomes his stepson, Warren Spooner. It has all the elements that would make it appealing to me: set in the South, dysfunctional family, eccentric characters, quirky author. By page 182 I can tell you that Calmer was well-named, Spooner was still bizarrely behaved in high school, and my pile of unread books was growing because I could not drag myself back to this one.
