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Train: A Novelby Pete Dexter
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Train is an 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname "the Mile Away Man." Packard's easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scared in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard's tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship kindness is never far from cruelty.
In Train, National Book Award winner Pete Dexter creates a startling, irresistibly readable book that crackles with suspense and the live-wire voices of its characters. Review:"Extraordinary....This masterful book is such a formidable achievement, it creates its own frame of reference. Other writers must now be measured against Pete Dexter." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:"In clear, pitch-perfect prose, Dexter moves the relentless story forward, exposing the ironies and dark undercurrents of charitable actions. The calamitous conclusion looms over the novel from the start, and it comes just as the reader knows it must." Publishers Weekly
Review:"What deepens and darkens [Dexter's] 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." John Skow, Time
Review:"There are pleasures aplenty: superbly rendered characters, every detail just right....And, perhaps best of all, there's the golf: fitting naturally into its noir context." Booklist
Review:"As always, Dexter gets violence on paper with a harsh precision, and the pages turn with a potboiler's fleetness. When the final boom rumbles, readers are likely to be up well past their bedtimes." Jonathan Miles, New York Times
Review:"The strength of the novel lies far beyond its noirish setting or graphic plot twists. It is rather in Dexter's assured and direct handling of the ever-tangled subject of how ordinary people try to ford the nation's racial divide in pursuit of, or in flight from, deeper human truths." Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post
Review:"Dexter?s skill resides in keeping an atmosphere of menace close to the surface at all times, so that the violent collision of the worlds surrounding Packard seems inevitable." The New Yorker
Review:"Dexter...may not exactly be a noir writer, but he has always had an affinity for the urban underside, and with Train he plunges headfirst into hard-boiled territory, producing a work as visceral as a knife blade to the throat." Chicago Tribune
Review:"With a narrative taut, tight and unrelenting, this is Dexter's best novel since his National Book Award-winning Paris Trout....It's mean, tough and tender, and emotionally, and conceptually, highly charged." Houston Chronicle
Review:"With an exhilarating crime novel that mixes race, sex, murder — and yes, golf — Pete Dexter hits a hole in one." Newsweek
Review:"Dexter is a superb writer....The narrative flows and weaves, dips and dances like a boxer in a championship bout." The Oregonian
Review:"Train is another morally questioning, tough-guy novel....Dexter's writing is a living thing. It doesn't draw attention to itself; it just works." Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
Review:"[U]nsparing....Train pulses with energy and meanness....But its characters are puppets, and its plot whiplashes about like an enraged pit bull shaking its prey to death. Prototypical Dexter, not nearly at his best." Kirkus Reviews
Review:"It's easy to get lost in Dexter's beautifully constructed sentences....Too often the author seems to be writing simply because he has time on his hands, as though the whole novel is nothing but a series of engrossing but ultimately pointless tangents." Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram
Review:"Dexter's writing fleshes its potboiler skeleton with a complicated beauty that makes you sorry when you come to the end. All you want is to continue reading this prose, regardless of what it may be talking about." South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Review:"Train is more than James Ellroy meets Tiger Woods. Dexter, in his lean, powerful style, digs into the complex dangers of race and love." Miami Herald
Review:"Dexter so skillfully weaves a feeling of never-ending dread into Train that you keep thumbing the pages wondering just when and how deep the bottom will drop. Because you know it will....Dexter's scenes are disturbingly magnificent..." Los Angeles Times
Review:"The novel's darkness and violence are often balanced by its humor and quirky characters....Train has the inevitability of Greek tragedy..." San Antonio Express-News
Review:"Utterly gripping....A superbly written book....Illuminated by vivid flashes of humor and humanity....Cunningly structured for maximum impact." The Economist
Review:"Because of Dexter's ability to put the reader inside the darkest recesses of his characters, it doesn't matter that there won't be a happy ending for anyone. Just like a train wreck, you have to look anyway." Hartford Courant
Review:"Spectacular, explosive....Mythic, comic and tragic, Train yields a treasure trove of harsh human wisdom." St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Review:"Dexter masterfully builds the suspense and each unwholesome character bounces off the other as the novel wends toward denouement....This is Dexter in top noir form, as only he can pull it off." Denver Post
Review:"Dexter's prose is muscular, dead-pan, hard-boiled. He evokes the '50s and its hypocrisies with deft sketches of people, places and encounters." Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Synopsis:National Book Award winner Pete Dexter crafts a stunning novel of crime, race, and unlikely liaisons — a tautly written Los Angeles noir set in the 1950s that brings to mind Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
About the AuthorPete Dexter is the author of the National Book Award winner Paris Trout and of God's Pocket, Deadwood, Brotherly Love, and The Paperboy. He was born in Michigan and raised in Georgia, Illinois, and eastern South Dakota. He lives in Puget Sound, Washington.
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