This is a riveting if disturbing novel that takes place in North Florida in the late 1960's. North Florida has it all, the beautiful beaches of St. Augustine, the gator-rich St. John's River that is home to numerous colorful, if inbred, swamp families; it has the State Penitentiary in the town of Starke that harbors the infamous electric chair known as "Old Sparky." Indeed Old Sparky was the demise of many a villain including Ted Bundy before it became sluggish, bereft of juice. With too many sparks and too much smoke, incapable of the quick fix, Sparky was eventually put to pasture. But in this book the old throne has a date with Hillary Van Wetter who was convicted of murdering the local sheriff. It does not matter that the sheriff murdered 16 black men in his tenure. He murdered a single white dude and that became his undoing. But Hillary Van Wetter, a violent, sociopathic swamp-donkey may very well be innocent.This sets the table for Pete Dexter's story. When a pair of award-winning journalists arrive from Miami, the conflict begins. The term "paperboy" refers to anyone in the newspaper business-- delivery boys, writers, editors, owners. The paperboys seek to spring Van Wetter, not because they care about him, or about justice, but because it will be a big story that can win fame and prizes. This becomes a wonderful, if cynical, look into the newspaper business.The narration of the story, for me, made this a page-turner. The story is told by the 19 year old younger brother of Ward James, one of the writers seeking to expose the corruption that imprisoned an innocent man. The James family are newspaper people from top to bottom. The Van Wetter family are swamp people, gater-harvesters, from top to bottom.Eventually the conflict becomes family vs. family, class vs. class, the educated vs. the stupid.Within the rich array of characters linger quiet, subterranean sexual longings that erupt into unspeakable violence. This is not for the faint of heart. There are a couple of scenes in which half naked swamp people, genitals dangling, slobber ice cream with hilarious abandon. But they are scary, even as you chuckle.It's a tragic book but I couldn't put it down. While I prefer books that are dialogue-driven, this seemed heavy on the exposition. But it never slowed me down, probably because the narration was spot on.And there is a moral to this story: never underestimate your ice cream-slobbering troglodyte.
I picked this up on a whim -- partly because I wanted to try something from Dexter, and partly because before I watch the apparently fantastically bad movie version, I want to have the original book to compare it to. Set in 1969, the story revolves around two brothers involved in the newspaper business, the elder Ward as a reporter for the Miami Herald, and his 20-year-old sibling Jack as a delivery driver for their father's daily paper in (fictional) Moat County in central Florida. There's a semblance of a thriller plot, as Ward returns home with his northeastern brahmin reporting partner, Yardley Acheman, to investigate a death row case. Backswamp white trash thug Hillary Van Wetter sits in jail convicted of the murder of a sheriff who was himself notorious for killing around twenty people (almost all black) during his years on the job. Death row groupie and general femme fatale/aging sexpot Charlotte is enlisted by the reporters to assist, and Jack is hired to chauffeur them around. The bulk of the book follows a kind of period procedural thriller template, tracing the steps of their investigation, while dangling the threat of Charlotte as a cat among pigeons.Of course, the really dangerous person is Acheman, and the final third wades through the aftermath of his and Ward's story on Van Wetter. At which point, the book offers no tidy answers (which is fine, I don't need them), but seems more interested in throwing a bunch of themes at the wall and embellishing on the general southern gothic tone. There's a good deal of water and nature imagery (and Dexter isn't exactly subtle about it: Moat County, Van Wetter, etc...), some gruesome attacks on the brothers (one by jellyfish, one by sailors), themes of self-destruction, rather perfunctory father/son/family issues, treatment of journalistic ethics and generations, creepy apartment buildings, meditations on manhood, and more. It's an uneasy stew that never blended all that well for me and left me wondering what the point of it all was.Note: After finishing the book, I watched the film version, and it is spectacularly bad. And even though the book's author was involved in the screenplay, there
What do You think about The Paperboy (1996)?
There is some amazing writing here -- taut, surprising, incredibly perceptive. Take this description of the man kicked to death by the sheriff in the first pages, former car salesman Jerome Van Wetter who was discharged finally not for being a drunk -- which he was, but drunks, in fact, are not always bad salesmen;someone has to sell cars to other drunks -- but because, even after he had been at the dealership many years and was as familiar a showroom fixture to loyal Plymouth buyers as the new models themselves, something in his deportment frightened customers off. He could not overcome it with clothes or talk of the state champion Little League team or his smile. The smile, in fact, only made things worse. I know this having once been left alone with that smile and the new line of Plymouths while my father and Mr. Duncan went into the office to close a deal on a Chrysler. The indistinct malevolence which Jerome Van Wetter carried hung off him at unexpected angles in much the way his suits hung on his bones, but gathered to its purpose in his eyes. There was a predatory aspect to the way they fell on you, expecting something, waiting, a tiny interest finally stirring, like a slow smile, as he found the little places inside you where he did not belong. He seemed to understand the effect he had on customers, and wore sunglasses indoors.On the surface, the book first appears as a mystery. But I think it's more a study of the different sides of love built around the corruption of the reporters who are trying to uncover the truth behind Van Wetter and then the sheriff's murder. I never doubted these characters for a moment and the setting rang very true. Don't watch the movie, BTW. Awful.
—Robin Kirk
The last words of the novel captures its theme: "There are no intact men". Beneath the appearance of a simple story of journalism, the novel deals with Truth and Weakness. There is something interesting in this respect: although those may be the themes that give interest to the story, the narrator does not make any explicit moral reflection on them. It is up to you, reader, to draw your own conclusions.It is the story of a gifted journalist, as honest and talented as his father, an editor of a local newspaper, would have ever desired him to be. Yet, able as he is to unveil the hidden truth around him, he is unable to come to terms with his own one; that is, to let his own secret come to the surface when it finally happens to call the attention of other colleagues.The character who initially seems weak turns out to be stronger than the ones who appeared more solid at the beginning of the novel. Because there is nothing that makes you stronger than acknowledging your own weakness: "There are no intact men"
—Luis Ortiz
I was waiting for a great culmination.... That didn't happen. The ending was rushed and disappointing in the fact that there were too many questions not resolved, which I know is what led to the ending, but would have been appreciated after spending hours waiting for said resolution. The language was a little crass for me and not significant to the storyline. Pertaining to grammar, the author's incorrect use of pronouns often kept me guessing to whom "he" was referring; I had to re-read a few paragraphs a few times and was still left guessing.
—Karie Lee
