"The Lifetime movie of my divorce and crime spree will be entitled Breakdown at Midnight. . . . Sympathy for my character will be established by my loss of a wildly respectable, lucrative job with Arthur Andersen, a company which turned out to be as crooked as its customers. I will be another orphan of the American Dream gone sour, and eventually I will give in to the so-called dark side of my nature when I strangle Carmine with the strap of her Prada bag, or stab her to death with a survivalist-quality knife, or bludgeon her skull to a bloody pulp with a classic Tiffany lamp; this part of the script will have to wait for the real event to unfold since, though I've decided that tomorrow will be the day I kill her, I have yet to choose how." --Charley Stranger Turning headline news into biting social satire, Jim Grimsley exposes the amorality of materialistic America in Forgiveness, a blackly comic tale of a bankrupt accounting executive who dreams of achieving stardom in the only way a pathetic failure can--by murdering his wife. As Charley Stranger imagines the crime, he fantasizes wildly unlikely encounters with celebrities--sharing marital woes with Nicole Kidman over a latte at Starbucks, being interviewed by Barbara Walters--while in real life his wife Carmine incessantly ridicules his inability to perform either in bed or in the marketplace. As Forgiveness veers to its shocking conclusion, it strips bare the corruption of the American Dream--the moral bankruptcy of corporate and political institutions, the hollowness of living in a media-saturated world, the delusion of buying love with luxury goods.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Grimsley's hollow fantasy of upper-middle-class homicide has little to do with forgiveness. Three years after being laid off from his senior job at Arthur Anderson, Charley Stranger can no longer support the haute California lifestyle he and his spoiled, Botoxed wife, Carmine, are used to. Carmine wants a divorce, knowing Charley is no longer bothering to look for work, though it takes a visit from their obese banker son, Frankie, to realize the true extent of the financial damage. The fights are nasty: Carmine tells Charley he looks like "[o]ne of the fucking Teletubbies.... the purple one, the grey one." Meanwhile, Charley rehearses his violent thoughts in imaginary exchanges with famous actresses and interviewers like Barbara Walters, and in running sitcom scripts that chronicle years' of the family's mutual scorn. When Charley actually kills Carmine and Frank, the murders are described in some detail—as part of a literary tongue-in-cheek, of course. Grimsley's tale is a single-minded, scathingly unfunny look at American materialism. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Charlie has been unemployed for three years, and his wife, Carmine--whom he thinks has been out of work ever since their wedding 25 years ago, busy with cosmetic surgery (never mind that she raised their son and daughter)--is fed up with his sloth, his drinking, and their impending poverty. The last is relative, since she drives a late-model Lexus, and he hasn't let the maid go. After Carmine announces she's planning a divorce, Charlie spends three days drunk in the pool house and decides to murder her so spectacularly that he'll be interviewed by the likes of Katie Couric (in particular), who'll ask whether homicide has changed his life. He also plans a Lifetime movie, Breakdown at Midnight. In Grimsley's smoothly executed, grimly humorous satire, things ultimately turn savagely icy for this "failed wreck" of an accountant who aspires to renown "of a peculiar character, since it must earn for [him] all the bounty of fame and celebrity without the appearance of seeking to do so." Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reeling with shock,
By
This review is from: Forgiveness (James a. Michener Fiction Series) (Hardcover)
Grimsley's Charley Stranger rants, bitches and moans against his universe and his family with a fresh, real verisimilitude that really clicks over the pages of this slender and very funny novel. I've read my share of chick lit, and at first glance this viciously amusing book would appear to be a male version of the genre. Charley's wife is a woman so evil Dell Comics could use her as a supervillain. Charley himself is a very big kid, dreaming about being in love with the Asian actress in a TV car commercial, eating too much, drowning in vodka, and exchanging nasty insults with his wife at the kitchen table because neither has a job or any intention of getting one. Charley is undersexed, small of penis, his sexuality somewhat indeterminate.
But just when you think you can settle comfortably in Charley's fantasy world and come out with some insights into male humor, Grimsley does what chick lit authors so rarely do. He delivers. He follows the flaws of his human character all the way out to their logical end. What do I know about literature? But Forgiveness felt like a very great book indeed, fresh and new and bitingly funny in its conception and barreling towards a conclusion that left me reeling.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What, no editor?,
By Liz Cary "Lizzie" (Upper midwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Forgiveness (James a. Michener Fiction Series) (Hardcover)
Not only was this book ugly and unoriginal, the myriad lexographical errors were supremely annoying. The narrator wants to take care of something "quietly and discretely" and he also has a "waddle" under his chin. Puzzling inconsistencies in the timeframe are the result, I'm convinced, of laziness and are not intentional. This book feels like it was written over a long weekend. Don't waste your time.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An Absolute Disappointment,
By Noley "niloreid" (Evansville, IN USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Forgiveness (James a. Michener Fiction Series) (Hardcover)
I did not need this book to be like Grimsley's novel _My Drowning_, which I loved. But I did need this book to be good. All of the lyrical imagery and compelling character voice of _My Drowning_ is absent here, and its hole is filled with drab, angry, purposeless characters and plot. Yes, I get the indictment of popular culture going on in _Forgiveness_, but who cares if I can't stand to be in the same room with this narrator and his wife? This novella is by no means literary fiction and by no means good.
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