Alligator
Ratings2
Average rating3
15
Ratings2
Average rating3
"St. John's is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O'Connor country. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly's sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters"--Page 4 of cover.
Reviews with the most likes.
It's all beautiful bits of writing. Each chapter a finely wrought gem. There's a beautiful chapter on a failed marriage, a forgotten bottle of champagne, scribbling a script at stop lights and a car dying in the snow with her son in the back. The pages are filled with cyphers and symbols. As a whole it just doesn't feel like it's moving anywhere. Titling it Alligator and opening with the image of the alligator farmhand left me holding onto that thread for most of the book waiting for the payoff. It never really comes.
