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Summary: Please -- we need a new Dexter book!
Review: Pete Dexter is one of the most overlooked writers around. His style is beautifully lyrical, insightful with great characterization. Granted, his stories are dark examples of the human condition but well worth the journey. If you want a fast-moving plot, a pretty story or happy endings, you won't find them here. What you will find is some of the best writing you will ever read. I must admit to a bias here because Pete and I worked together in the '70s at a couple of newspapers so I consider him a friend. But I'm also a book editor and reviewer and read a lot, and I've read all Pete's books and consider this one of the best. Now, if he'll quit writing movie scripts ("Rush" and "Michael" to name a couple)long enough to write another fine novel, we'd all be happy!
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Summary: A Great Novel - Don't Hesitate !
Review: Pete Dexter is truly an amazing artist! This book will haunt you long after completing it. Take your time, read it slowly, the pacing is as important as the content. An engrossing, and at times harrowing, study of family ties, duty, pain, personal history, and ultimately self-destruction.
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Summary: Ohh, Brother, Brother, what have you done?
Review: Pete Dexter's latest novel immediatly strikes the reader as being a mystery, a whodunit, a question to be answered. Yet these questions disappear throughout the text to make room for a male only family and their slow spinning downfall. Set-off by way of the Newspaper business The Paperboy delivers the reader through the swamp lands of Florida to a land akin to that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yet the darkest place of all, somehow, is the space a story takes between three men who are bound together by family love and possibly an understandable self-destructive mechanism
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Summary: A Pleasant Surprise on the Remainder Table
Review: Previous reviews on this page pretty well sum up this book, so I won't embellish the already-said. Sadly, I found it on the remainder tables at Supercrown. Happily, I found it well written, thoughtful, and generally a good read. What a deal. I think I'll hunt up more Dexter.
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Summary: Very good - classic Pete Dexter
Review: Quite similar in tone to Paris Trout and Brotherly Love. As with Dexter's other novels, the book revolves around the characters studies. The author implies that while one person's life is defined by what they have done, another's is defined by what they have not done. For those in the latter category, determining if something is truly missing or simply thought to be missing from their lives can prove to be the character's salvation or undoing. Apart from the characters, the scene descriptions, particularly of the Florida swampland, are quite well written. You can almost feel the mud between your toes.
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Summary: A novel that fulfills the promise of its stunning opening
Review: The opening paragraphs of Pete Dexter's latest novel set the tone and pace of a story of quiet poignancy and crystalline violence. Dexter really does have a genius for openings. Even better than Brotherly Love (and less gratuitously bizarre than Paris Trout) The Paperboy also cleverly reveals a relationship of brothers, making us wonder how much we know and understand our own family. There isn't a poorly realised character, the love story is subtly drawn and profoundly sad, while the plot (investigating the conviction of a death-row murderer) makes the book un-put-downable. I can't wait for his next
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Summary: Suspenseful character study
Review: The Paperboy is a compelling tale of personal commitment and perserverence gone awry. Pete Dexter's terse but poetic writing enables the reader to become involved with the quirky characters immediately. The story is completely engrossing, with the moral "message" less obvious than his more famous "Paris Trout". The genre is difficult to chatacterize. It is a character study rather than a thriller, although the tale is quite suspenseful, with a convicted murderer's innocence or guilt being central to the plot. Equally involving is the relationship of the newspaper editor and his sons, one of whom is the investigative reporter, the other the story's narrator. This is one of those novels you insist that your friends read, if only to experience the quality of Dexter's writing and his insight into human frailties
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Summary: slow moving
Review: The story is quite boring and unfolds itself rather slowly. Don't read this book if you are the impatient kind of person. Don't expect action or gore in this book.
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Summary: One of the best I've read this year!
Review: This book grabbed me from the first page. Narrated from the younger brother's, Jack, point of view, the story keeps your attention on the story unfolding. The events that take place in the Florida swamps are especially riveting. The descriptions the author uses are wonderful. This was a great book and I would recommend it to everyone.
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Summary: The "Morality" of Journalism
Review: This is one of those books where you can't turn the pages fast enough. I sat up all night reading it. It's a devastating satire of post-Watergate investigative journalism, a splendid neo-noir, and one of the most tragic, haunting stories you will ever read. The plot involves the investigation of a murder in a small Southern town. Dexter writes twists and turns that are shocking, but seem chillingly inevitable once you've put down the book. I can't recommend this strongly enough. "There are no intact men." Amen.
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