Prisoner's Dilemma

Eddie Hobson is quickly succumbing to a mysterious illness, and his children draw on the World War II veteran's dictaphone-recorded construction of an imaginary utopia for clues to their father's illness

Eddie Hobson is a former history teacher who cannot escape the past. Seared by a painful experience during World War II, he develops a mysterious illness that gradually alienates him from even his own wife and children. Hobson's illness has grim physical symptoms, but its essence is ``his need to love people without knowing whether they deserved it.'' Interlaced with a third-person anatomy of the Hobson family are the first-person musings of a son trying to understand his father's eventual death. Although his subject is pathology, Powers provides a dazzling display of wit (riddles, triple puns, and palindromes) that may entertain, but also contributes to the themes of this remarkably well-crafted novel. Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

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Eddie Hobson Sr. is paterfamilias personified. A retired history teacher in DeKalb, Ill., he has raised his childrenArtie, Lily, Rachel and Eddie Jr.by talking to them in riddles and plaguing them with questions and tests. After a lifetime of being ruled by this petty tyrant, the now-grown children find it almost impossible, and painfully distressing, to concede that Pop might be really ill. But the virtuoso invalid and black comedian keeps passing out, and it seems the family must accept the inevitable. Artie, who worships the old man while hating him, describes his father's slow decline, interspersing his account with childhood memories and details of the mysterious dictaphone recordings that Pop has been making in private for so long. The recordings that Artie listens to secretly at last reveal the father to the son. Skillfully alternating lively colloquial dialogue with Artie's fluid, elegiac recollections, Powers, author of the praised Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance brings each member of the family to vivid, quirky life in this accomplished narrative. (March) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.