Forgiveness

by Grimsley, Jim

• ISBN13: 9780292716698
• ISBN10: 0292716699
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

"What a great pleasure it always is to watch Jim Grimsley's estimable sensibility at work observing and deconstructing the foibles and follies of modern culture. In Forgiveness he exposes, with devastating wit, our cult of body and of fame. This is a brilliant and important novel." --Robert Olen Butler "The Lifetime movie of my divorce and crime spree will be entitled Breakdown at Midnight .... Sympathy for my character will be established by my loss of a wildly respectable, lucrative job with Arthur Andersen, a company which turned out to be as crooked as its customers. I will be another orphan of the American Dream gone sour, and eventually I will give in to the so-called dark side of my nature when I strangle Carmine with the strap of her Prada bag, or stab her to death with a survivalist-quality knife, or bludgeon her skull to a bloody pulp with a classic Tiffany lamp; this part of the script will have to wait for the real event to unfold since, though I've decided that tomorrow will be the day I kill her, I have yet to choose how." --Charley Stranger Turning headline news into biting social satire, Jim Grimsley exposes the amorality of materialistic America in Forgiveness , a blackly comic tale of a bankrupt accounting executive who dreams of achieving stardom in the only way a pathetic failure can--by murdering his wife. As Charley Stranger imagines the crime, he fantasizes wildly unlikely encounters with celebrities--sharing marital woes with Nicole Kidman over a latte at Starbucks, being interviewed by Barbara Walters--while in real life his wife Carmine incessantly ridicules his inability to perform either in bed or in the marketplace. As Forgiveness veers to its shocking conclusion, it strips bare the corruption of the American Dream--the moral bankruptcy of corporate and political institutions, the hollowness of living in a media-saturated world, the delusion of buying love with luxury goods.

Table of Contents

My Lifetime Movie Begins An Ordinary Person, Much Like Yourself

You Always Kill the One

You Love Not the Thing Itself but the Appearance of the Thing

The Last Days of the Golden Age Purchase Forty

Whacks In Black and White At LastMy Exclusive Interview!

Frankly It's These Geese Again Movie Nature: A Flashback Child Abuse

Chances Are My Chances Are

Epilogue

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