Trombone: A Novel - Softcover

Nova, Craig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802139132 ISBN 13: 9780802139139

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

Synopsis

Craig Nova's classic novel Trombone is a powerful and poignant portrait of the complexities between an arsonist father and his good son. Dean Gollancz is an easygoing man of modest means. He longs for the Big Time, and when his job at the Print Shop doesn't pay the bills, he commits arson for a Chinese gangster in Los Angeles. His son Ray feels deep love and loyalty for his father, but when he wins an Ivy League scholarship, Ray must decide how much of his own life to sacrifice for Dean's respect. The destructive nature of their relationship is brought to the fore when Iris, a classmate of Ray's, becomes his father's lover. Longing for Iris and knowing he can never be like Dean, Ray must decide whether he even wants to be, and whether it is right to be that way at all. "[Nova's novels] deserve to be ranked among the best American fiction of the past two decades." -- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "Trombone is a novel of crime, passion, adventure ... by one of our most acclaimed and prolific fiction writers." -- Howard Frank Mosher

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

An adolescent's philandering father is training him to be an arnist--until a woman steps between them. In his seventh novel (Tornado Alley, 1989, etc.), Nova matches his hard-boiled style with his blue-collar milieu--where small-time crooks and inscrutable Oriental kingpins do business--and enables the story barely to survive its stereotypes. It opens with California print-shop owner Dean Gollancz taking his son Ray with him to commit arson and collect payment from Mr. Mei, who reads Marcus Aurelius and leads the good life. ``I'm not a firebug,'' Dean tells his son. ``I'm an arsonist. There are good reasons for a building to disappear....'' While Ray learns the rules of the trade, Dean philanders on wife Marge, ten years his elder with a ``constant antagonism to the passage of time,'' and takes up with teenaged Iris Mason, whom Ray loves. Ray, who is smart enough for college (Dean: ``I thought you were going into the printing business. Isn't that what we'd always planned?''), takes the fall for Dean when Iris's father shows up at their house, enraged. Iris disappears (with help from Mei?); Ray leaves town, then returns to tell his father to ``stop acting like a small-time crook!'' and goes to Mei to locate Iris. In return for information, he agrees to torch a condo, and in Vegas--after digressions and filler--he finds Iris, a high-paid call girl. The two will take off--forever--after a final visit to Mr. Mei. Nova's eye for human detail and gritty texture is nearly unerring--even while elements of story and character occasionally veer too close to hackneyed genre formulations. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Nova ( The Good Son ; Incandescence ) here taps the heat and energy of the bond between a son and his arsonist father . Ray Gollanz is not yet 20 when he first accompanies his father, Dean, on his outside job as an arsonist-for-hire. Intelligent and perceptive, Ray knows that his much-beloved dad father used twice already is a big talker and a ladies' man who signals the end of each affair by playing his trombone. The potentially destructive nature 'join forces' below of Ray and Dean's attachment, captured first in Ray's memory of their watching the light of atom bomb tests when he was a little boy, is stirred when Dean and Iris Mason, Ray's high-school classmate in Bakersfield, Calif., become an item. After Dean is scared off by Iris's father, Ray and Iris join forces and together begin to test the limits of their tolerance for danger and self-revelation. Iris leaves home and Ray, opposing Dean, accepts a scholarship to college in the East. He comes back to Bakersfield when Dean's life begins to fall apart and, facing the risk of exposing his feelings, attempts both to find Iris and to sort through the demands of filial loyalty. Calling to mind Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart , this ambitious novel is hampered by its schematic plot and the sometimes portentous, often strangled dialogue of characters who cannot say what they feel. Yet the gritty settings and the vivid characterizations of Ray and Dean, combined with the compelling undercurrent of tension, create a powerful effect.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802139132
• ISBN 13: 9780802139139
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256