Word: weesner
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...genius is out there at this very moment, bloodying the keys of a word processor and hacking out the Moby Dick of divorce novels. But if only 50% of U.S. marriages end in divorce, why does it seem that 75% of new novels obsess on this deadly subject? Theodore Weesner is the latest good writer to prove that maundering in print about the nasty process of getting shucked is less likely to be entertaining than novelizing about salmonella...
...Author Weesner, a professor of German at the University of New Hampshire, tries to air out his novel with long, wistful passages recounting Glen's bittersweet entanglement with a married German woman when he was a young soldier. These sections work as a love story but, told in retrospect, simply point toward the hero in sour middle age. Scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down are clumsily atmospheric; East Germany is free and Glen at last has his divorce, but the connection is stagy. Maybe the moral is, Write about what you know, sure, except if what you know...
...THEODORE WEESNER...
...outline, an unprepossessing story-a punk's progress. In this first novel, Theodore Weesner's tones are flat, sometimes excessively precise. Yet the book develops a building power. It is, for one thing, an achievement of almost perfect sympathy. One begins caring about Alex-his guilt, his daydreams, his bewildered adolescent innocence. Descendants of Huckleberry Finn, Alex and his brother do cannonball dives into the polluted muck of an urban river, cracking exuberant and forlorn scatological jokes about what they are swimming...
Alex's father, alcoholic, grimy with grease, possesses only a vocabulary of manly cliches. The father works in the local Chevrolet plant, making the bright cars that his son will steal. Yet between him and his boy, Weesner draws an evasive tenderness, a shared vulnerability and hence a curious kind of dignity...