Someone is telling the
story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going
well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises and in a
house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like
out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when
the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along
to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite
past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.
Then,
against all odds, something goes right for a change: Charlie is granted a
second act. With help from his storyteller son, he surveys the facts of
his life and finds his true calling where he least expects it—in a
sacrifice that redounds with selflessness and love—at last becoming the
man his son always knew he could be.
A Calling for Charlie Barnes
is a profound and tender portrait of a man whose desperate need to be
loved is his downfall, and a brutally funny account of how that love is
ultimately earned.
Reviews
“With meticulous, wry prose and a dash of self-effacing metafiction, Joshua Ferris delves deeply into the simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary life of Charlie Barnes, a man with as much failure in him as found in our bankrupted country. This novel, about dentures and toupees and all the ways we disguise ourselves from our intimates, is at its large heart a moving portrait of a father and son to rival the best of Roth.”―Teddy Wayne, author of Apartment
"Joshua Ferris is one of our best writers, and A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant. Ingeniously written, it had me up reading late into the night. A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities."―Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others
“Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest.”―Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Chances Are…
"If Augie March was a “Columbus of the near-at-hand,” Charlie Barnes is a whole America: a dreaming, scheming paterfamilias forever “expanding out to the coasts” and outstripping whatever inconvenient facts or exuberant fictions might hope to contain him. Is he for real? Are any of us? This much is certain: Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write."―Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
Previous Praise for Joshua Ferris
"Ferris's prose is brash, extravagant, and chillingly beautiful."―The New Yorker
"Arresting, ground-shifting, beautiful and tragic. This is the book a new generation of writers will answer to. No one in America writes like this."―Gary Shteyngart, author of Lake Success
"Utterly compelling. . . . Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millenium."―Booklist
"As he's demonstrated in each of his novels, Joshua Ferris is a writer who's keenly attuned to the unsettled quality of our times."―Bookreporter.com
"Plenty of novels, memoirs and cultural studies have explored the end of men or the failings of masculinity. But Ferris, a darkly comic writer who feels like the novelist equivalent of the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, has managed to write a series of stories on the subject that feels fresh. His male characters mess up, in small and spectacular fashion, but their misdeeds often prompt our sympathy, thanks to Ferris's insightful narration."―Ian Shapira, Washington Post
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