Jesse's Ghost
A Novel
by Frank Bergon
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
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Pub Date Jun 01 2011 | Archive Date Sep 01 2012
Description
Everybody loved Jesse. Boys wanted to be him-or beat him-and girls wanted tobe with him. In California's Central Valley, where fist fighting was a noblesport and drinking and sex were rites of passage for teenagers, Jesse was thetoughest kid in the valley. Until he was murdered by his best friend.
Jesse's Ghost is a powerfulnovel about a man haunted by the crime he committed decades ago and therealization that the ghosts of his past will always haunt him. These are thesons and daughters of the people portrayed in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath-Dust Bowl descendants whocame of age when toughness, hard work, and loyalty defined what it meant to bea man in America.
Through the chaos that surrounded him, the risks he took, and despite themistakes he made, Jesse pursued the American Dream. His friend Sonny, in themoving, funny, and tragic story he narrates in Jesse's Ghost, seeks a new life and redemption.
Advance Praise
"A haunting, even archetypal, ballad of betrayal and survival."
-Booklist
"Frank Bergon is truly a gifted writer with a fine eye and ear, strong descriptive powers, humor and intelligence."
-Peter Matthiessen
"Jesse's Ghost dusts up the Central Valley of California-the dirt and sweat of a Gerald Haslam, the drunken brawl of a Floyd Salas-as it haunts the offspring of Steinbeck. Bergon revisits a tough, rural generation that is passing, just as our new century resurrects a new era of economic struggle."
-Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Flowers
"Jesse's Ghost, Frank Bergon's alarming and powerful new novel, is an astonishing trip to the dark side of the American Dream. Readers, be warned: like its furious and doomed anti-hero Jesse Floyd, who wants to die fighting and does, this book packs a mighty wallop."
-Valerie Martin, author of The Confessions of Edward Day
"Jesse's Ghost, a raw drama of the farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley, almost reads like a tale of an isolated culture in another country, where violence is ritualized and heedlessness characterizes behavior once the day's hard work is over. Frank Bergon knows this territory well and reveals his character's blindness with disturbing simplicity and dispassion, moving the reader to sorrow and empathy."
-Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City
"Jesse's Ghost is a beauty--a roughcut gem, a world alien but not alienating. Sonny's voice is pitch perfect, and Jesse comes through vividly, winningly, a downscale Western Gatsby who meets a very similar end. For all the novel's violence and tragedy, the tone throughout much of it is startlingly rapturous. It throbs with a kind of joy in being young and alive and sexed-up."
-Paul Russell, author of The Coming Storm
"Frank Bergon tells a primal story of friendship, and of the vertiginous passage between youth and maturity: a shifting fugue of attractions and rivalries that determines his characters and also persists over time. Tersely written and elegiacally told, Jesse's Ghost unlocks a past that is both dream and nightmare, revisiting a summer's awakening that concludes with the darkest impulses of the soul."
-Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781597141536 |
| PRICE | 20.00 |
| PAGES | 224 |
