The Ambidextrist: A Novel - Hardcover

Rock, Peter

3.32

60 ratings by Goodreads

9781893956223: The Ambidextrist: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1893956229 ISBN 13: 9781893956223

Publisher: Context Books, 2002

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As Scott, a hapless drifter who supports himself as a medical test subject, searches for love, affection, and respect from the residents in a desolate town, he finds himself struggling to control his interactions with the people he encounters. 20,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Peter Rock was born and raised in Salt Lake City. His most recent novel is The Shelter Cycle (978-0544289635). He is also the author of the novels My Abandonment (978-0156035521), This Is the Place (978-0385485982), Carnival Wolves (978-0385492096) The Bewildered, and The Ambidextrist, and a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. His stories and freelance writing have both appeared and been anthologized widely, and his books published in various countries and languages. The recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Alex Award and others, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. His YA novel Klickitat will be published in 2016 and his novel-within-photographs, Spells, will be shown at Blue Sky Gallery in 2015 and published as a book sometime in the future.

From Publishers Weekly:

At the center of this desolate novel filled with vagrants, wayward teens and lonely, fearful men and women, is Scott, a drifter with a "stupid kind of charm," who supports himself by participating in psychiatric experiments. On the grimy banks of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, he meets and befriends Ray, an older homeless man living in a dismal corner of the city's waterworks, hiding from people in his makeshift garden. Scott himself has come to Philadelphia with delusions of entering into standard society: he fixes his attention on Ruth, a lonely airline security worker whose 13-year-old brother, Terrell, has fallen in with a gang of teenage thugs who kill time on the dingy waterfront. As Ruth rebuffs Scott's advances, he attempts to form a friendship with Terrell, who has increasingly come under the malignant influence of his new friends. Their antics begin harmlessly enough tattoos, fooling around with girls but soon escalate into cruelty and violence. Though his portrayal of the itinerant existence of Scott and Ray, as well as of the cockiness of Terrell and his teenage friends, is direct and unsentimental, Rock (Carnival Wolves) shies away from probing deeper into the psyches of his characters or exploring their motives. This lends his story a journalistic, almost documentary immediacy, but also distances the readers from Rock's protagonists. The novel is best appreciated for its taut, spare prose, which skillfully evokes the isolation of listless lives.

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