Because the Rain
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A new Hemingway" (San Francisco Chronicle) weaves together the stories of two men and the Vietnamese call girl who unites them.
Set on the rain-slicked streets of Chicago, critically acclaimed author Daniel Buckman explores the unfocused longing and unfulfilled expectations of two men balanced precariously on the edge.
Mike Spence is an unsatisfied writer with nothing left to write about. He lives in Chicago with his wife and an enormous burden of unrealized expectations hanging over his head. To escape he concocts elaborate fantasies about travel and career and how his life will be different once he gets this job, takes that vacation, marries a different girl. He ends each evening staring out his darkened window and into the apartment of a beautiful Vietnamese girl who lives in the two-flat across the street.
Donald Goetzler is a Vietnam Vet who made it through, spent the last thirty years of his life riding a desk at Weber Industrial Supply, and is now retiring with a bad Mexican buffet and a gold Rolex. He's got nothing to look forward to but his weekly session with the Vietnamese call girl who takes him back through his memories of when he was young and his life was real.
As the two men construct their elaborate fantasy worlds around the same woman, these three souls are unaware of the shocking and explosive consequences that the intersection of their lives will bring
In a beautifully crafted novel, Daniel Buckman demonstrates the prodigious talent that informs repeated comparisons to Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, and O'Brien, and once again tantalizes with the possibility that his name will one day be etched in American literature alongside the masters.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buckman (Morning Dark; Names of Rivers) plumbs themes of despair, humiliation and revenge in this dark and pulpy tale. Antihero Mike Spence, a former paratrooper who reinvented himself as a writer, joins a Chicago police recruit class to get himself out of a spiritual rut. His decision to stop writing has alienated Mike from his wife, Susan, who had an abortion a "sad and humiliating thing" so that he could write. At night, they sit in their dark apartment and watch an Asian call girl parade topless in front of her window. The woman, Annie, who fled Vietnam as a child, also discreetly watches Mike when not servicing clients like Donald Goetzler, a haunted Vietnam vet who uses Annie's high-priced attentions to quell his tortured psyche. A series of events that begins with Susan's murder links Mike, Annie and Goetzler in an unlikely triangle that hinges on acts of misguided vengeance. Buckman writes convincingly of Vietnam vets and captures nicely the disillusionment his characters share. It's a bleak but redeeming read.
