Life Between Wars
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
There is no question who killed the tourist scuba diver caught poaching from local lobster traps at dawn off Penscot Island. Robby Cochran letting the guy go unpunished would have been the surprise. But aftermath brings down flutters of doubt that are near miraculous in a thug like Robby, and he's only the first to find the rules and customs he's living by overturned by his act. Life Between Wars examines the ripples being caused by one violent incident as they disperse and build to a virtual tidal wave through the Penscot community. Meet teenagers bending on comic crusades for sex and contraband, a would-be nun seeking a last romance to miss from within the cloister, and an eccentric octogenarian certain he's seeing the face of God in his backyard shrubbery. An ex-lieutenant and his former platoon sergeant warily circle one another, too old to be reliving ugly rivalries born in South Vietnam almost two decades earlier, yet too set in the ways to risk the dangers of forgiveness. There is a flamboyant painter, with frightening and thrilling sexual infatuations, along with his delusions of terminal illness. And then there is the handicapped youth whose very nickname, "Johnwayne," both parodies and embodies the mystery of proper American manhood that so compels and befuddles his neighbors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Patton, the grandson of General George S. Patton and author of The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family, creates a fictional New England island as the stage for a crowded psychological drama of guilt, retribution and enlightenment. Penscot Island, a tourist hive in the summer, is the year-round home to a variety of frustrated souls. Vietnam veterans, fishermen, a maid, a would-be nun, kitchen help, a homosexual artist, two aged local gentry, a 14-year-old boy and a young girl from New York crisscross the narrative in varying degrees of distress, pursuing goals remarkable only for their ordinariness. With the exception of 14-year-old Brendan Cochran, the son of a tormented Vietnam vet, these are sad, stunted men and women motivated by stubborn belief in honor, God and love. Central to the plot are three acts of violence: one dates from the Vietnam War; the other two, which are impulsive random affairs, are present-day killings which propel the sequence of events. The story's energy comes from the clarity with which Patton shows people doing terrible things in the name of lofty but ultimately hollow ideals. Yet the sense of community these misfits are able to forge among themselves offers a bright spot in their lives. As a counterpoint to the morally clumsy adults stands Brendan, a child not yet sullied by commonplace sins of lust, pride and treachery. Patton writes piercing descriptions and displays a razor-sharp intelligence, but he hits the drums of irony a bit too hard, which nearly obscures the faint notes of compassion he too timidly sounds. FYI: Life Between Wars will be published simultaneously with the first novel Patton completed, Up, Down & Sideways (see review below).
