„Ferris Joshua” – książki

Charlie Barnes is a mid-century man devoted to his newspaper and his landline. But Charlie is about to get dragged into our troubled age by his storyteller son, who has a different idea of him than he has of himself. Then there are his other children, his ex-wives, present wife, business clients, friends and acquaintances, all of whom have their competing opinions of Charlie. A striver, romantic, and thoroughgoing capitalist, he's blindsided by the Great Recession and a dose of bad news. Rethinking his entire life, he starts to wonder: what makes a man real? What makes him good? And how does the story we tell about ourselves line up with the lives that we actually live?

Charlie Barnes is a father, small-business owner, con-man, and failure. At sixty-eight and on his fifth marriage, he is facing the end of his life - which is good a time as any for a reckoning. It's down to Charlie's son, Jake Barnes, to write his father's story. What have his father's desperate dreams amounted to? If Charlie's life was a series of fantasies, then how is it possible for his son to tell the truth about him? And will Jake have to confront the fact that in their ambitions, and their delusions, they might not be so different after all? Joshua Ferris's new novel is both a profoundly tender portrait of a man whose downfall is his desperate need to be loved, and a witty portrayal of a life lost in the American dream.