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Title details for Jernigan by David Gates - Available

Jernigan

by David Gates
Stuart Evers
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?)
Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his vulnerable new girlfriend Martha and, eventually, himself - until the laughs have turned to mute horror. But while he's busy burning every bridge back to the people who love him, Jernigan's perverse charisma keeps us all in thrall to the bitter end.
Shot through with gin and irony, Jernigan is a funny, scary, mesmerising portrait of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open - wisecracking all the way.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Serpent's Tail Classics

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 6, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781782831792

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781782831792
      • File size: 754 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 29, 1991
      Peter Jernigan is an LSD-popping alcoholic whose drunken wife killed herself in a bizarre accident. Living on gin and irony, taking refuge in Wallace Stevens or William Burroughs, he gets fired from his job in New York City but almost manages to convince himself that he's a responsible father to his confused teenage son, Danny, a rock guitarist. Jernigan's emotional numbness continues when he moves in with Martha, a single mother who raises rabbits in the basement of her New Jersey home, then shoots and devours them. The action in this depressing first novel is framed by a Fourth of July and a white Christmas. But instead of all-American families we get adolescent suicide, wife beating, addiction, divorce and a powerful portrait of two generations unable to communicate with each other. Gates's tale lags in momentum as his self-pitying narrator, insisting that he's functional even as he increasingly loses touch with reality, fails to confront the guilt, rage and self-hate lurking within himself.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 30, 1992
      Self-pitying, alcoholic widower Peter Jernigan, unable to communicate with his confused teenage son and emotionally distanced from his live-in lover, narrates this depressing first novel. Author tour.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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