Customer Reviews

The Caveman's Valentine (Compass Press)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A very fine debut novel by an up and coming new author. The Caveman's Valentine has great characters and a great story. The central character, Romulus Ledbetter, is one of my favorite characters of all time. He's a bum, a vagrant, an intellect, a psychotic, a father, a hero, and just about the most interesting person you'd ever meet. His visions of Stuyvesant as the evil white controller are especially funny. But what really impressed me about this book was Green's impressive ability to move the mystery along without taking away from Ledbetter's conflict with the world around him and with himself. Green does not detract from the real story that interests every reader: what really goes on in the character's head. We read Valentine and feel sorry for Romulus and want him to succeed in whatever he sets out to do. Much of what he says is frank and to the point, which is a way in which we would all like to be. The dialogue and actions of this man are often times d! ownright hilarious. This is a character impossible to forget. While I have gone on endlessly about character and how it plays a great role in this novel, it is important to know that the plot aint to shabby either.

George Dawes Green's "The Caveman's Valentine is a definite "must read" for those of you who like great characters, humorous situations, and lively dialogue. Buy it, read it, and enjoy.

I am a fan of Samuel L. Jackson. He is one of the few actors whose movies I will watch no matter what they are. That is how I stumbled on the film adaption of this book. I loved the movie, and so I went to read the novel. This book is fantastic. First of all, hats off to the film's director for making such a true adaption. And hats off to the author for writing such an increadible book. The character is hysterical and tragic and truely one of the most intriguing people I have ever read about. I wanted this book to go on and on. The characters are complex and the writing style is sharp and unique. The author made me care about what was happening, and that is rare in modern literature. I would recommend this book to anyone, and I am defiantly going to read more of the works of George Dawes Green.

This is a wonderfully crafted mystery. Perhaps more importantly though, in these days of you-gotta-have-a-gimmick mysteries (quilting mystery,cooking mystery,Jane Austen mystery,cab-driver mystery.....) no one has yet to match the unique central character of Caveman's Valentine. Romulus Ledbetter lets us into his world of schizophrenia and, hopefully by the end of the book, the reader understands and gains empathy for this illness that affects one in every hundred people in the U.S.. Romulus captures our attention, our compassion, and our hearts. I salute Mr. Green for finally casting the schizophrenic as the hero in this novel, instead of the killer at the core of far too many mysteries and thrillers to count.

Romulus Ledbetter is the undiscussed relative of his upper-class black family. He's a paranoid schizophrenic who lives in a cave and is a brilliant pianist, able to make the "Mr. Clean" jingle touching (whoever is scoring the movie is going to go through hell pulling THAT one off.) He also lives in a cave. He's a homeless man with pride.

This mystery is some really sharp stuff. Green writes with a great skill for placing words and creates some often hysterical vignettes and exchanges, but he's very careful, burying clues, motivations, and other crucial information in the text in such a way that it doesn't seem important until you finish and realize there are no cracks in the armor. It's meticulous and excellent.

This is definitely worth a read. It's off the beaten path and a good example of technique, well worth the money.

I'm glad I read Green's "The Juror" before I read "The Caveman's Valentine." I enjoyed "Juror" but I would have been so disappointed with it after having read "Caveman". I guess I would have been expecting another wonderfully quirky, insane protagonist. I was thinking "Fisher King" by p. 30. Romulus is a homeless man who lives in a cave. His demons are Stuyvesant and y-rays. He's also a brilliant pianist...a Julliard drop-out. But when a dead man is left at his door, he tries to get his head straight to solve the mystery for his friend Weasel. I really loved the main characters in this book. I only hope the author will get back to something like this, instead of trying to please the mainstream readers.

I stumbled onto this book when searching for good mystery authors...I heard that this book won the Edgar award and so I found it at my library. Now I hear that it has recently been turned into a movie with Samuel L. Jackson...all I can say is, you need to read this book because the movie cannot possibly do it justice. A unique twist on a protaganist and a poetic writing style make this book far different from most formulaic detective novels. I was reminded of the beautiful poetic style of Ray Bradbury combined with the twists and turns of a Jeffery Deaver mystery. Most of the book revolves around the fascinating, and almost sane, interior ramblings of the main character, which could never be duplicated on the silver screen. An excellent first novel.

Just when you think you've read it all, George Dawes Green comes up with something completely new. This is your basic murder mystery, where someone finds a body, the cops write it off, but there's one stolwart citizen who's out to find the truth. The catch is, the protagonist is Romulus Ledbetter, a former musical genius turned homeless schizophrenic. Called the caveman, he gets a nasty shock when someone dumps a body outside of his cave. Convinced this is the work of Cornelius Stuyvesant, the nefarious and imaginary source of all societies ills, Romulus sets out on a quest to find the truth in the heart of evil, civilization. Green's prose is colorful and funny, and he keeps his chapters short and sharp. Told mostly from the perspective of Romulus, the reader is never quite sure what is truth and what is the result of Romulus' paranoia. Still, Green's style keeps it real and draws the reader into this partial imagined world and although there are scenes when Romulus seems to function much better than one would expect from a schizophrenic homeless person, the suspension of disbelief holds and keeps this mystery going. A superb read, a must for murder mystery fans.

This is an entertaining and well written first novel, which is very reminiscent of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem -- if you enjoy this, you will also like that detective story about a similarly unreliable narrator (in that case the narrator has Tourette's syndrome). Both books struggle with the same problem...with such an interesting and unreliable lead character, how do you keep the plot moving along, and allow the reader to "solve" the mystery along with the narrator. The problem is that the narrator must be relatively coherent in order for the reader to tag along, and this coherency occasionally seems at odds with the narrator's disease.

Also, I had to put this book down a couple of times--there are some descriptions of torture, needles, and AIDS that are disturbing...I think the author could fairly be accused of exploiting homophobia for dramatic purposes (the purported villain is a Mapplethorpe-like character)--I don't know -- if you are one of those people who think that when the Indians are the bad guys it is an anti Native American movie, then that logic applies here as well. Or you can see his approach as an even-handed look at the unfairness and irrationality of these same fears, etc, etc. I thought it was more on the exploitative side myself, but that is just my opinion.

One final thing--I think every new author wants to try his hand at writing a sex scene, and Green is no exception. He isn't that good at it.

However, I am being too critical...this was definitely an enjoyable read...perfect for an airplane.

I've finished the book and enjoyed it although I'm finding myself enjoying the movie for it's frenetic pacing slightly more. While the book certainly ties up more of the plot's loose ends and shows a glimmer of hope for Rom's future, the pacing of the story suffers near the middle as the motivations and histories of all the different characters (many who are left out of the film) are introduced and explored.

This debut novel, set in modern day New York City, is a very unique mystery with a protagonist, Romulus Ledbetter, who is unique to say the least. Romulus is a classically trained musician who lives in a cave in New York's Central Park, perennially in fear of the control beams emanating from the Chrysler Building by his arch-nemesis "Stuyvesant".

Having alienated himself from his family, Romulus feels safe and secure in his cave, watching imaginary monday night football games from a hollowed out television with no picture tube, until a corpse is dumped near his cave and Rom goes to work trying to investigate (both to clear his name and due to some sense of obgligation to the deceased). Ledbetter gets around pretty well for a homeless man, and the story takes him from luxury apartments to an estate in the Hudson River Valley, where he encounters a world of artistic and sexual depravity.

The novel portrays paranoid schizophrenia with compassion and a little poignant humor, and almost despite yourself you are drawn into the plot. There are of course considerable discrepancies between the facts as they exist, and those occuring in Ledbetter's vivid imagination. However Green pulls off the dichotomy with skill, so that we can make sense of the novel's action while still understanding its hero, his fears and motivations.

There are a few leaps of logic in the plot, including some action upstate that doesn't seem to fit, but overall I thought this book was a very enjoyable ride.