Alligator [Hardcover]

Lisa Moore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2005

Lisa Moore’s wickedly fresh first novel—a Canadian best seller, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian and Caribbean region), and a Globe and Mail Book of the Year—moves with the swiftness of an alligator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters mingling in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland. St. John’s is a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Colleen is a seventeen-year-old would-be ecoterrorist, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. Her mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief after the death of her husband. Beverly’s sister, Madeleine, is a driven, aging filmmaker who obsesses over completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from sociopathic Russian sailor Valentin, whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator is a remarkable book, a suspenseful, heartfelt, and sexy story that examines the ruthlessly reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The powerful American debut of Canadian bestseller Moore does for Newfoundland what Empire Falls did for dying smalltown Maine and The Sportswriter did for suburban New Jersey. Seventeen-year-old Colleen Clark and her mother, Beverly, can't overcome their grief over the sudden death of David, Beverly's husband and Colleen's stepfather. While Beverly copes by dieting and retreating into herself, Colleen downloads videos of beheadings off the Internet and tries her hand at eco-terrorism ("I wanted to change things," she says about dumping sugar into a bulldozer's gas tank) before running away to Louisiana"where alligators troll the bayou. Madeleine, Beverly's older sister, scrambles to finish her cinematic opus before her heart"heavy with longing for her youth and gradually weakening due to an unnamed medical condition"gives out. Frank, a 19-year-old still reeling from his mother's death from cancer, obsesses over Colleen and finds himself intertwined with Valentin, a Russian gangster with his own tormented past. Powerfully drawn secondary characters"an actress in Madeleine's film, Valentin's lover"add depth to this generous novel. (Sept. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—The lives of several interconnected people in St. John's, Newfoundland, appear to be both ordinary and off the beaten path. Readers first meet teenage Colleen, who has just put sugar in the gas tanks of forest-clearing equipment-and been caught. Through her, they meet her aunt Madeleine, a middle-aged, self-absorbed indie filmmaker in the midst of making her crowning achievement. The woman leads the peripatetic life of an artist who is also responsible for finding the money to finance her projects. Widowed Beverly, Colleen's mother and Madeleine's sister, is trying to cope with her sorrow and not quite paying attention to her daughter. Other characters include Frank, who grew up poor and is saving his hard-earned money, and, living above him, Augustin, a ruthless Russian sociopath who's seen and done it all. He meets and sleeps with Isobel, a fading actress whose final "big" role will be in the film. The eponymous alligator appears in one of Madeleine's films that Colleen sees early on; near the book's end, she goes to Louisiana in a quest to meet the man attacked by the animal, who survived and runs an alligator farm. The plot is just sufficient enough to form a book, although there is a fiery climax. However, the best part is the fresh writing. There are frequent flashbacks, done seamlessly. With lively, real, expressive writing that pulls readers into the story, this slice-of-life novel will be popular with teens.—Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: House of Anansi Pr; Har/Cas edition (September 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887841953
• ISBN-13: 978-0887841958
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,288,779 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Newfoundland novel explores the effects of grief on character, December 5, 2006

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Alligator: A Novel (Paperback)

It's present-day St. John's, Newfoundland, a summer when the elm spanner worms (think gypsy moths at their very worst) munch their way through the trees, dropping disgustingly onto passersby.

Colleen, a 17-year-old would-be eco-terrorist, starts things off, downloading beheadings off the Internet while thumbing through "Cosmo." Then we meet Frank, a 19-year-old hot dog stand owner, newly out on his own after his mother's death. He is as hardworking, focused, sweet and lonely as Colleen is aimless, angry, and loved.

Then there's Madeleine, Colleen's glamorous, aging aunt, a film producer driven to finish her magnum opus before her weak heart kills her, and her sister Beverly, Colleen's mother, a tower of strength who's at her wit's end. Lastly we meet two secondary characters, Valentin, a Russian thug, as he likes to think of himself, and Isobel, Valentin's lover and the fading star of Madeleine's film.

Canadian author Lisa Moore's first novel moves from character to character, changing points of view with each brief chapter, sometimes moving from third to first person and shifting tenses from past to present.

Grief, the sort of grief that changes the course of life, preoccupies all of them. Colleen and Beverly still mourn the death of David, step-dad and husband, four years dead, while Frank thinks vividly of his mother's lingering cancer death and his awful, solitary vigil. And Madeleine still misses the husband she left 30 years before (and now talks to nightly while his pregnant young wife sleeps). Valentin mourns his lost, harsh childhood and Isobel mulls her regrets.

But this is not a dark or depressing novel - it's too full of energy and life. And Moore employs an adroit, dry humor to delineate character.

Beverly, who talks to strangers easily, advises a man on a Christmas present: "'Is she a stay-at-home Mom?' Beverly felt a mild disdain for women who gave up careers with the excuse of raising children when most normal people could do both, but she felt guilty about the opinion, and often claimed to be envious."

Madeleine, assessing yet another young romantic prospect: "Trevor Barker's apartment was in the same condo as Madeleine's on Military Road and was all coarse fibers and bran-coloured. It makes her worry about what he will cook."

Moore, twice a finalist for Canada's Giller Prize (for this novel and for the short story collection, "Open"), writes intense, precise and anecdotal prose. Her characters roil with strong emotions, which sometimes impel them to act and other times are tamped or subsumed by will. There's an edgy energy to this first novel, making the reader aware that anything can happen at any moment, some of it prompted by human action, some just unavoidable fate, like David's aneurysm or Frank's mother's cancer or Valentin's ruthless opportunism.

Each of her characters has learned this lesson, some better than others. Colleen steals a bottle of vodka and tries to return it for a bottle of wine just to see what will happen. This is the day before she is to be sentenced for her solitary act of eco-terror, pouring sugar into the fuel tanks of clear-cutting machines, an act which involved hours of dangerous effort, hitchhiking and walking through the dark woods, all to be undone in an instant - fleeing and leaving her backpack on the ground, complete with wallet and identification.

That night, afterwards, in an instant during a car accident when Colleen faces the prospect of death, she forgets what it is she's been sad about for so long.

"Then she remembered. She missed her stepfather.

"And because she had taken that brief break....because of that very uplifting rest, the grief came back triplefold.

"It was a sock in the gut and she lost her breath, which also may have had to do with the airbag and maybe a fractured rib."

Colleen is difficult to love. At her best she's self-absorbed, but even at her worst, there's a gulf of (self-absorbed) despair and regret that makes the reader sympathize with her, yet never persuades her to alter her course as she cuts a wide swath through other people's hearts.

Like Valentin, Colleen is a force of nature. But, given her privileged circumstances and the nurturing love in her life, you know her chances of outgrowing her destructiveness are good. Valentin, however, is purely repellant and scary, lost despite his sad past and moments of hope.

Moore mulls the effects social circumstances and random fate can have on the best and worst of characters and leaves the reader haunted by her story and the voices of her narrative. A powerful writer with an agile and lively imagination.

-- Portsmouth Herald

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of a kind, April 19, 2009

By 

Lauren B. Davis (Princeton, New Jersey) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Alligator: A Novel (Paperback)

Every aspiring writer should read this book to learn how to create fascinating, believable characters. Splendid, unique voice. Full of perception. Highly recommended.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Destined for Newfie Lit 101, January 18, 2007

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Alligator: A Novel (Paperback)

Newfoundland has a certain mild fascination, sitting there right in the center of things and yet remote and cimmerian. We look down on it sometimes, as we fly between London and New York and wonder what it's like down there. In Anne Proulx's "Shipping News" and in the Vinland sagas everything is a little weird, but Lisa Moore's "Alligator" makes it sound a fairly normal piece of North America. People live in condominiums or suburban houses rather than wooden shacks or earth huts. They eat radicchio and sleep on futons and have their tongues pierced just like everyone else. Most of the local color is in a movie that Madeleine, one of the characters is producing, set in the 1820's about an archbishop making sure that churches have the proper chalices and making soup for his mother. Madeleine is suffering from chest pains and her sister Beverly is suffering from a tree-hugging promiscuous alligator-loving daughter, Colleen.Newfoundland's not a great place for alligator watchers so Colleen runs off to Louisiana with money she steals from Frank. Frank has a one night stand with Colleen but it mostly worried about his hot dog stand and what to do with his mother's ashes (all the males are upset by losing mothers) and by trying to avoid the depredations of Valentin, the nasty Russian who is having an affair with Isabel, who is acting in Madeleine's movie. The story is told MPOV with separate chapters for each POV.
There is some excellent writing, as in the quote in the New York Times review that led me to buy this. In fact it's amongst the best Newfoundland novels I've read so far this year.