Joe Jones: A Novel
Lamott has written before about copingwith death in Hard Laughter , with life in Rosie. But Joe Jones is about nothing else; coping seems to fill the hearts and minds of the characters at Jessie's Cafe, and it certainly dominates their epigrammatic, italic-studded conversation. Not that theirs isn't a lot to cope with. Louise, cook and philosophical earth mother, pines for Joe, the faithless lover she sent away, and he, a hypochondriacal drifter, longs for her. Willie, Jessie's gay grandson, loses a lover to a distant job and his grandmother to heart failure. And those are only their current trials. Lamott's spare prose can sing, but here it too often sounds forced. "Life is hard and then you die," as these characters note more than once, is too trendy and insubstantial a framework for the fine work Lamott can do. Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.