The Body of Jonah Boyd

A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. "A superb modern novelist of feeling."-Kirkus Reviews "He is in full command of a sharp, elegant style."-USA Today "Remarkably gifted."-Washington Post "A perceptive, probing chronicler of our time."-Sacramento Bee Editorial Reviews This engaging though slight family romance centers on manipulative psychoanalyst Ernest Wright; his hysterical wife, Nancy; and their teenage children, Daphne and neurotic budding writer Ben. Their household is a magnet for complicated and clandestine entanglements, with narrator Denny, secretary and lover to Ernest and surrogate daughter to Nancy, fetishizing the Wright house as a substitute for the home she never had; and Glenn, Ernest's graduate student and doppelganger, secretly loving up Daphne. Enter, one Thanksgiving in 1969, Nancy's best friend Anne and her novelist husband, the charming wife-beater Jonah Boyd, who become blowsily seductive surrogate mother and warmly paternal literary mentor to Ben. When the notebooks containing Jonah's nearly finished masterpiece go missing, they take on a mythic status that reverberates through Ben's subsequent career. The tale draws a link between literary creation and family procreation: just as a book started by one writer can be finished by another, the process of psychosexual development started by parents is completed by their Oedipal and Electra stand-ins. Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes; Equal Affections; etc.) possesses a limpid style, a gift for characterization and a sharp eye for middl.

Product Info

ISBN: 0747568286

ISBN-13: 9780747568285

Publisher: Gardners Books

Year: 2005

Type: Used

Binding: Softcover

Seller Info

InfinityBooksJapan

Address: 1F Komagata Heights Bldg Tokyo,

Website: https://www.infinitybooksjapan.com

Country: Japan