Still Can't See Nothin' Comin': A Novel - Hardcover

Marshall, Daniel Grey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060198621 ISBN 13: 9780060198626

Publisher: Regan Books, 2001

Synopsis

After a burglary attempt leaves two people dead, a sixteen-year-old boy is running from the law and reliving the demons of a brutal childhood and an abusive father.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel Grey Marshall, age 23, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He began working on Still Can't See Nothin' Comin' at the age of 15. Marshall lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on a second novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Fifteen-year-old Jim Drake thinks hyperbolically, rather than logically: a ceiling isn't just high, it is "like a mile off the floor"; a car doesn't just speed up, it goes "about a million miles per hour." Marshall was 15 years old himself when he began writing this brutal coming-of-age novel, set in the early 1990s in Madison, Wis. Now 23, he turns out a powerful if solipsistic tale of dysfunction. Jim and his older sister, Mandy, put up a united front against their father's drunken abuse and their mother's denial; younger brother Billy is the only child left unscathed. Jim would like to protect his sister, but depresses her by starting down the path of violence and alcohol himself. The central cataclysm in both Jim's life and the Drake household comes when Mandy is hit by a train. In the aftermath of her death, Jim's father begins to torture him nightly. Desperate, Jim escapes the household, camping out with his friends, Philly and Jeremy. The latter, who's Mandy's former boyfriend, has grown twisted inside since Mandy's death; Jim's binge drinking, meanwhile, drives away his own girlfriend, Leslie. With his friends, Jim slides from the mild delinquency of shoplifting to more serious crimes, like robbing a drug dealer, then a store. The emotional climax of the story is reached when Jim discovers Mandy's diary, which reveals the extent of their father's sexual abuse of his daughter. Like Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Miller's first novel speaks with the futile but feverish lyricism of adolescence, its scenes set against a backdrop of suburban repression. Northeast regional author appearances.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Regan Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0060198621
• ISBN 13: 9780060198626
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336