Word: weesner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...