Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea: Novel, A - Softcover

Bausch, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060928573 ISBN 13: 9780060928575

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1997

Synopsis

The critics have been effusive in their praise for Richard Bausch's Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America and All the Ships at Sea.His hardover sales have also never been higher. Taking its title from Walter Winchell's famous radio salutation, Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America opens in Washington, DC, in 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination, telling the story of Walter Marshall, an idealistic 19-year-old who lives with his widowed mother and studies to be a journalist like his hero, Edward R. Murrow. In this coming-of-age novel in the truest sense of the phrase, young Marshall fumbles toward manhood in a nation that is itself in the midst of cataclysmic change.

With the same elegance and precision that has distinguished his other novels, Richard Bausch has evoked a sense of time and place in a different America and brings the last 30 years of history profoundly and vividly to life.

About this title

Review:

Richard Bausch's 19-year-old protagonist, Walter Marshall, is a naive young man in a time when cynicism has not yet hardened the American spirit. He reveres the recently assassinated Jack Kennedy, is a complete idealist, and wants to be president so that he can change the world. He is also an inept innocent with little chance of making it in politics, a realization that fails to keep him from trying to please everyone, including the two young women to whom he is simultaneously engaged. Bausch handles Walter's unworldliness with gentle comedy, as if he somehow pines for a bit of the before-the-flood innocence irrevocably lost to his own generation in the Vietnam War. In the end, Walter gives up on the White House but fails to lose his endearing optimism.

About the Author:

Richard Bausch is the author of nine other novels and seven volumes of short stories. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and other publications, and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including the O. Henry Awards' Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. In 2004 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0060928573
• ISBN 13: 9780060928575
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352