ALBERT HIMSELF: (none) - Softcover

Bens, Jeff.w

4.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1883285224 ISBN 13: 9781883285227

Publisher: Delphinium, 2001

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On a humid evening on the streets of New Orleans, Albert Fitzmorris thinks he sees an angel - a woman in a pale dress with a shimmering halo of golden hair. Watching as she floats up the steps of a French Quarter hotel, Albert imagines a new life, free from loneliness and yearning. He envisions the path to his redemption. Albert's life is deceptively simple. He lives with his widowed mother. He plays poker every week with his deceased da's aging cronies. He sells fish in a market in the Quarter. But Albert's inner world is complex: convincing himself that he is protecting the people he loves, Albert lives by half-truths and deception. When Albert's ex-girlfriend, Eileen - the mother of his nearly three-year-old daughter - moves on to a new boyfriend, his inner life is set in turmoil. Afraid he is being displaced in his daughter's heart by another man, that his mother considers him a disappointment, that his dead father would see him as a failure, at thirty-five years old Albert plunges into doomed romantic fantasy. He pins his hopes for salvation on elusive, illusionary Chelsea, the blond woman - the angel - whom he tracks down and who, against all odds, just might help set him free.

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About the Author:

Jeff W. Bens lives in Winston-Salem, NC where teaches in the School of Filmmaking at The North Carolina School of the Arts. Albert, Himself is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

The charming protagonist of this slight first novel, a chubby, kindhearted sad sack of a fishmonger named Albert Fitzmorris, lives with his widowed mother in working-class Irish New Orleans. His three-year-old daughter, Audrey, lives with her mother Eileen, a self-centered ex-girlfriend of Albert's, and Eileen's new boyfriend, a jazz trumpeter who has begun to replace Albert in Audrey's affections. Albert feels pressure from his mother and his father's conservative Catholic friends to marry Eileen, but can't bring himself to admit that she has left him. As the novel opens, he catches sight of a beautiful blond restaurant hostess named Chelsea and is compelled to pursue her. This ill-fated courtship eventually changes Albert, helping him to assert his individuality and keep a place in his daughter's life. Albert is a sweet, gentle character, the sort of bumbling innocent to be rooted for with one eye closed. The other characters, though, never fully take shape except as foils for Albert's haplessness, in part because Bens' dialogue is often hackneyed. The novel alternates somewhat haphazardly between no-frills narrative and shorthand, staccato layering of sentence fragments: "Spraying fish guts from the steel counter into the sink. Not minding the fish, the smell he was raised with. But the boredom." This style sometimes works, particularly in Bens' description of food: "Chops and the smell of fresh mint, the bubble of thick chowder in two deep pots, the scent of sweet onion and flames leaping around panfulls of fat shrimp..." The omission of parts of speech eventually becomes irritating, though, too precious for the simplicity of the plot and characters. There's some nice local color here, but the story and dialogue aren't meaty enough to thicken this broth into a satisfying gumbo.

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