- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (31 Mar 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0385338104
- ISBN-13: 978-0385338103
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 116,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
"A beautifully crafted book of enormous heart, humility, wit, honesty and vulnerability.... Utterly magnificent." -- Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors "Witty, tender, and beautifully written. You fall in love with Joe." -- -Sue Margolis, author of Apocalipstick
Disproving Thomas Wolfe's adage that you can never go home again, Joe Goffman returns to the small-town and the family he once escaped. Unfortunately Joe has written a novel (which was made into a major Hollywood movie) that savages everyone in the town, particularly infuriating the local bookclub. His father is in a coma, he barely knows his brother and he desperately wants the forgiveness of his ex-girlfriend, the only woman he has ever loved. Joe's novel has made him a millionaire but returning home forces him to admit his own loneliness and his need for reconciliation with the past. The Book of Joe has an affecting, thoughtful power that is more than the sum of its well-crafted, if conventional, parts. It questions relationships, finds the forgiveness in life and is as emotional a journey as any in the Bruce Springsteen songs that the characters grew up with. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Disproving Thomas Wolfe's adage that you can never go home again, Joe Goffman returns to the small-town and the family he once escaped. Unfortunately Joe has written a novel (which was made into a major Hollywood movie) that savages everyone in the town, particularly infuriating the local bookclub. His father is in a coma, he barely knows his brother and he desperately wants the forgiveness of his ex-girlfriend, the only woman he has ever loved. Joe's novel has made him a millionaire but returning home forces him to admit his own loneliness and his need for reconciliation with the past. The Book of Joe has an affecting, thoughtful power that is more than the sum of its well-crafted, if conventional, parts. It questions relationships, finds the forgiveness in life and is as emotional a journey as any in the Bruce Springsteen songs that the characters grew up with. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Augusten Burroughs
"A beautifully crafted book of enormous heart, humility, wit, honesty and vulnerability...Utterly magnificent."
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
1 for the price of 2,
By Cathreader (Berkshire UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Book of Joe (Paperback)
Wonderful book, but please don't make the same mistake I did and buy Bush Falls too - The Book of Joe and Bush Falls are exactly the same book, just with a different title. Very well worth reading, however!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If we wouldn't look down, we'd make it to the other side.",
By M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Book of Joe (Hardcover)
Anyone who has ever lived in a small town, and left it for the big city is really going to appreciate this wonderfully sly, clever and whimsical novel by Jonathan Tropper, where memory is never beholden to chronology. With its duel narrative, switching from the present to the mid nineteen eighties, The Book of Joe tells the story of Joe Goffman, who returns to his hometown of Bush Falls in Connecticut after he learns that his estranged father is in a coma. A scathing and contemptuous novel Joe once wrote afflicts and sours his homecoming; but to make matters worse, the novel has been made into a hit movie, which damns the small mindedness and bigotry of the town. Now thirty four, and living an "empty" life in New York, Joe returns to face the demons of the past and to face his friends and family with whom he hasn’t had much to do with for seventeen years.Joe returns to a town that is solidly immersed in recession, with for sale signs on the front lawns, and a sense of desperation in the "quotidian tidiness." And to many of the residents, Joe has done unknowable and irreparable damage to their town, and to their reputations. The local book club throws copies of his book onto his lawn, a customer at the local cafe hurls a milkshake over him, and his childhood sweetheart Carly - with who he is still in love – is angry and resentful at his thoughtlessness in writing the book. Joe faces an uphill battle to reconnect with his brother Brad, and Brad's wife Cindy, but he succeeds forming an adolescent bond with his nephew Jared, and his old friend Wayne, who has returned to Bush Falls from Los Angeles, and who is now suffering from AIDS. Joe has spent so much time re-living and rewriting those years that he can no longer discern "which vignettes are the result of which process." But through his daffy, intuitive literary agent Owen, Joe comes to terms with the fact that he has a compulsive need right past wrongs. As the scattered fragments of Joes past "pop up like Starbucks franchises," he revisits the dreadful dealings of his senior year in nineteen eighty-six, where he discovers sex with Carly, and the fact that, Wayne and Sammy, his two best friends are gay. Joe loved to hang out with Wayne and Sammy, singing the lyrics to the music of Bruce Springsteen, smoking lots of dope, and salivating after Lucy Harber, Sammy's curvaceous and attractive mother. But Joe gradually finds himself becoming embroiled in the sexual politics of the town, as he tries desperately to keep Wayne and Sammy's affair a secret from the small-minded community. Seventeen years later, Joe wants to forgive Bush Falls and particularly his father, but somewhere he blinks and all those years has flown by in an "uneven forgiveness," which has "become septic, like an infection festering inside him." Joe has shed all those who cared about him "like a snakeskin." Joe thinks he's exorcised the demons by writing the book, but on returning to Bush Falls, he realizes that he's only appeased them temporarily. And he wonders how unwittingly he's drifted from the boy he used to be and how little he has to show for it. The last seventeen years seem to have been reduced to this tiny area on the map of his life, "just a little yellow shade on the legend to mark my time away from the falls." Tropper's message is that holding onto anger, in whatever form, is a waste of time, in fact, it's a waste of life. Immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable, and with a nicely controlled narrative, The Book of Joe never falls into urban cliché or fake sentiment. Although some readers might find the ending a little predictable and contrived – there is the expected death, and also the expected romantic redemption for Joe, the story still remains one of the most entertaining the year. Immensely filmable and beautifully told, it comes as no surprise that the movie rights for this fine novel have been optioned. Mike Leonard May 04.
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE BOOK OF JOE,
By
This review is from: The Book of Joe (Paperback)
An excellent read. I am a huge Jonathan Tropper fan and have read and loved all his books but have to say The Book of Joe is my favourite. The story is about a man who leaves his hometown and writes a revealing book about the folk living there only to find he has to return when his father is ill only to face the wrath of the people he wrote about. What is so superb about the author is that he has the ability in his writing to make you laugh and cry, as although very funny it also touches on sensitive subjects as well, and you cannot help but root for Joe, the hero of the book.
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