Jernigan (Serpent's Tail Classics)

by David Gates (Author), David Gates (Author), Stuart Evers (Introduction)

New
Paperback
2015
$10.51

Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?) Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his vulnerable new girlfriend Martha and, eventually, himself - until the laughs have turned to mute horror. But while he's busy burning every bridge back to the people who love him, Jernigan's perverse charisma keeps us all in thrall to the bitter end. Shot through with gin and irony, Jernigan is a funny, scary, mesmerising portrait of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open - wisecracking all the way.

Synopsis

Peter Jernigan's life is slipping out of control. His wife's gone, he's lost his job and he's a stranger to his teenage son. Worse, his only relief from all this reality - alcohol - is less effective by the day. And when the medicine doesn't work, you up the dose. And when that doesn't work, what then? (Apart from upping the dose again anyway, because who knows?) Jernigan's answer is to slowly turn his caustic wit on everyone around him - his wife Judith, his teenage son Danny, his vulnerable new girlfriend Martha and, eventually, himself - until the laughs have turned to mute horror. But while he's busy burning every bridge back to the people who love him, Jernigan's perverse charisma keeps us all in thrall to the bitter end. Shot through with gin and irony, Jernigan is a funny, scary, mesmerising portrait of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open - wisecracking all the way.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: Main - Classic edition
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Published: 06 Aug 2015
ISBN 10: 1781254907
ISBN 13: 9781781254905
Book Overview: Jernigan is the great lost American masterpiece of suburban despair, a modern Revolutionary Road or Stoner

Media Reviews

David Gates makes me sick with envy -- Nick Hornby
A sizzler of a novel, a whirlwind. It swept me up in the opening paragraphs ... I found myself wishing I could read fast enough to swallow it whole in a single sitting -- Joseph Heller
A bravura performance, sprawling and energetic, soused and noisy, with a bitter comic edge ... a rambunctious and enthralling portrait of a man who, by looking too closely, has finally lost sight of himself * Guardian *
A relentless, combustible mix of high literary art and low humour, wisecracking profanity and shellac dark glimpses into a man's wilful self-annihilation ... if there is one book that deserves to come in from the cold in the way Revolutionary Road, Alone in Berlin and Stoner have, it's David Gates's Jernigan. -- Stuart Evers
The minute he starts talking, Peter Jernigan, the narrator of David Gates' astonishing first novel, grabs you by the lapels and compels you to listen to the sad-funny-tragic story of his life ... one of recent literature's most memorable anti-heroes -- Michiko Kakutani * The New York Times *
What makes Gates' novel so good is not only its unblinking view of the horror and anomie of the American suburb, but also his hero's strangely seductive voice, which manages to be at once bitter and remorseful, funny and deluded * Financial Times *
The pleasures of David's Gates' superb novel lie in the voice he has created for Jernigan: boozy and belligerent, overdosed on irony, and characterised by its syntactical short circuits, abandoned clauses and half-finished thoughts ... a joy of a novel' * Observer *
Fearless in its exploration of expired American dreams and ruined prospects. A tale of fear and loathing in New Jersey, it strings beads of dark poetry and defiant laughter on the sinewy prose of survival -- Jay McInerney
One of the angriest and most sorrowful novels around -- Ben Marcus * New Yorker *
David Gates has created a memorable man for our times * Chicago Tribune *
Brilliant ... reveals the screaming exhilaration of life in free fall. * Esquire *
Extraordinary ... one of the more memorable pieces of literary heartache to come along in years. The best characters in fiction reveal themselves slowly, taking on a life so real they begin to live beyond their novels. You feel this happening with Jernigan. * Boston Sunday Globe *
Vivid ... honest ... a throat-tearing voice - bitterly ironic, crippled by hyperactive intelligence, at war with itself - that recalls the boozy obsessiveness from Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. * Village Voice Literary Supplement *
Peter Jernigan is a quintessential late 20th-century antihero ... with a wit so darkly sharp it could slice through a stack of Yellow Pages. * Washington Post *
Jernigan - an unflinching wonderful modern fool, like a great many of us - makes us practically howl at his late-century insights, dim and profound, somehow, at the same time. Terrific! -- Barry Hannah
Engrossing ... grimly funny, alarmingly revealing ... by the book's end Jernigan has taken on a mythic quality. * Cleveland Plain Dealer *
[A] considerable talent ... intelligent ... powerful ... subtle and moving. * Los Angeles Times *
[Jernigan] tells his tale so honestly, so self-critically, that the accounting itself becomes a kind of salvation. * Newsweek *
Jernigan the man [is] stewed to the eyeballs in the Zeitgeist. Jernigan the book is great, nasty fun. -- Joy Williams
Thorny, thoughtful, written with venom and verve, Jernigan paints an anguished portrait of an impenitent rebel. * Houston Chronicle *
Exquisite ... rich ... Jernigan is compelling, amusing and disturbing, a lively, naked exploration of a tormented man living a life without contours. * Kansas City Star *

Author Bio

David Gates lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was an editor at Newsweek, where he specialised in music and books. He is the author of two novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls, and the story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World. Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Paris Review and Granta.