Word: dexter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pete Dexter...
...Pete Dexter's eerie knack for placing himself inside the skin of even the minor players in his novels may be something like perfect pitch for a musician. It is a useful trick, done with no apparent effort -- in Dexter's case with no literary showiness whatsoever -- but by itself it does not make an artist. What deepens and darkens his writing, so that art is the precise word to describe it, is a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths...
This fatalism was the iron at the core of Paris Trout, Dexter's last novel, which won the National Book Award. Brotherly Love deals with tough guys living brutal lives. Toward the end, in the house of an old man who sells guns, matters go sour during a deal and one man shotguns two others. The old man waits to be shot himself, because that is the way things happen; he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now two lines...
That was when he started jumping off roofs. Not to kill himself, but to feel a stillness as he fell. Of soul, conscience? Peter doesn't know, and Dexter doesn't say. Peter goes on jumping as an adult, the way binge drinkers cycle back to booze. Four stories off a warehouse roof into a sandpile. And there is one other clue: though he has no talent except durability, he boxes hard rounds at a local gym. Nick, the owner, figures it out: Peter likes...
...JAZZY WONDERLAND (Columbia). And just when you thought you couldn't bear another Christmas song, here come 14 of them by a gaggle of top jazz artists ranging from Harry Connick Jr. and the Marsalis family to Dexter Gordon, Marlon Jordan and Joey DeFrancesco. Hardly the first -- but far from the worst...