More Than Enough
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
After a gang of neighborhood boys attacks Steven and his sister, Jenny, the Parkers are doing very well on the resulting settlement money. The family's dream of success in their new home of Salt Lake City seems fulfilled. But their period of high living soon ends, and each family member grasps at what he or she wants most.
Fourteen-year-old Jenny longs for normalcy, a state she tries to find in her Mormon friends' religion. Steven's father clings to his desire for affluence, even as his more practical wife tires of his dreams. For Steven, nothing is more important than keeping his teetering family together.
More Than Enough is a breathtaking dissection of human behavior and the American Dream. In it the break-up of a very ordinary family becomes utterly heart breaking. A novel that is as powerful in its dismantling of unremarkable lives as Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fulton bends the generic coming-of-age plot line to explore the effects of poverty and anger on a blue-collar Salt Lake City family in his first novel, which begins when 15-year-old Steven Parker and his sister, Jenny, are attacked by a Mormon gang. Steven's shoulder is dislocated in the scuffle, and a hospital visit puts a strain on the family's resources. Parker's family lives the high life for a brief period when the attacker's embarrassed father foots the bill for the boy's medical care, but once Parker's down-and-out, erratic father, Billy, goes through the money, the Parkers are once again forced to rely on Steven's mother, Mary, for support through her job as a nurse's aide in a rest home. But Mary has a twist of her own in mind when she tires of dealing with her husband's anger problems and takes up with a lawyer she meets during his visit to the rest home. Their impending union leads to an attempt to introduce Steven and Jenny to the lawyer's kids, but the effort to engineer an expanded family unit backfires when Steven's temper surfaces during his visit to the lawyer's house. Fulton's fast-moving prose and his knack for quirky scenes keeps the opening chapters interesting and unusual, and this might have been a compelling book had he increased the size of the attacker's award and stuck with the subplot of the Parkers living high on the hog. But the story line degenerates into genre clich once Fulton focuses on the family issues, dimming the efforts of a talented writer who duplicates much of the promise he showed in Retribution, his debut short story collection. Author tour.
