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Synopsis
Sharp, bittersweet tales of middle-aged American men, in hot water with their women, with their sweet or streetwise kids, with their own consciences. This is about the American husband and father: well meaning but caught out, horny but going to seed, adrift on dreams and fancies and looking for a break. Men in trouble. Each of these stories is touched by Wilson’s affection for male foibles. ‘Entertaining… Taut and funny’ — The Boston Globe ‘Sublime… it might be considered a companion volume to the movie ‘Sideways’’ — Seattle Weekly ‘Tantalising…his writing engages on every page with disarming intelligence and imagination’ — Elle Jonathan Wilson is the author of the biography Marc Chagall, two novels, A Palestine Affair and The Hiding Room, two collections of stories, Schoom and An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, and two critical studies of the fiction writings of Saul Bellow.
Jonathan Wilson is hard to pigeonhole. Brought up in England, he wrote his PhD in Israel and has lived in America for 30 years. Not surprisingly, his best fiction is about people unsure of where they belong. It moves between London, the American suburbs and the Middle East, exploring lives which don’t work out.His style moves around, too. An Ambulance is on the Way is a book of funny, sharp “stories of men in trouble” — middle-aged men whose lives and bodies are giving them pain. In Mini-Joe, a man thinks he has serious heart trouble. He does, but it’s not just his arteries that are causing him grief. In Dead Ringers, Henry fears he has prostate cancer. His “middle-aged balls” are giving him pain.But so is everything in his life — his mother and especially his wife: “Henry had seen a sign once stapled to a telephone pole near his house. It said, FOR SALE, FULL SET OF ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA. PERFECT CONDITION, UNUSED, WIFE KNOWS F***ING EVERYTHING.”....
David Herman
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