Waxwings - Hardcover

Raban, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330413201 ISBN 13: 9780330413206

Publisher: Picador, 2003

Synopsis

In Seattle at the turn of the millennium, two hopeful new immigrants are drawn to Seattle by their own different versions of the American Dream. For Tom Janeway - a Hungarian-born Englishman most at home with books - it is the chance for family he thought he'd never have. For an illegal alien - Chick, as he comes to call himself not long after escaping a cargo container - it is a land of opportunity that is his for the taking. With the local economy in flux, mutual need soon brings enterprising Chick together with the distracted professor, and each man finds himself more dependent on the other than he could ever have expected. The people around them are also in flux, busily charting imaginary futures that are baffling and obscure to friends and family, or exclude them altogether, until Tom's life suddenly tailspins into American tragedy, or American farce. Moving from the sheetrock cubicles of an Internet start-up to fund-raising dinners in lakeside mansions, from brand-new condos in Belltown to the tents of the homeless, from businessmen's clubs to police stations and the creaking timber houses of Queen Anne Hill - Jonathan Raban recreates the intricate honeycomb of a boom-town in winter, of a nation on the verge.

About this title

Product Description

Published In 2003 : 1st. Edition : 1st. Printing : Full Printing Numbers Listed , 1 - 9 : Picador Books : Overall , A Very Nice Book :

Review

Jonathan Raban's Waxwings is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, the city becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters--all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world--are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.

Thomas Janeway is a British novelist and professor of literature at the University of Washington whose life is coming apart in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son, Finn, but his wife, Beth, is caught up in the dot-com explosion, and the couple has grown apart. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Janeway's life crumbles around him. His wife leaves him, his house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction and his son is caught fighting in school. When he becomes a "person of interest" in the abduction and possible murder of a local girl, he is put on leave with pay from the university. Yet, Raban does not let Janeway--or any of his characters--wallow in self-pity. They all try to move forward with life, and even Janeway "the suspect" finds sympathetic allies in surprising places.

At one point in the novel, Janeway lectures his students on the "generosity" of VS Pritchett, saying that the writer believed "in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots". This "liberal realism" also characterises Raban's work. Raban treats all of his characters, from Janeway to Finn, with patience and balance. He fully inhabits each and tells fragments of the story from the perspective of Beth, Tom, Finn and even Tom's illegal-immigrant contractor, Chick. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality. Together the disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of a place, Seattle, at a unique moment in American history. --Patrick O'Kelley

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0330413201
• ISBN 13: 9780330413206
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320