Karoo: A Novel [Paperback]

Steve Tesich (Author), E. L. Doctorow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2004

Saul Karoo thinks. But understanding eludes. He lusts. And sometimes with success. He drinks. But he cannot get drunk. Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgment, he ruins them all. Originally published in 1998, shortly after the author's untimely death, this splendid new paperback edition, with an introduction by E. L. Doctorow, brings to the spotlight a book of shining causticity, humor, insight, and originality. Ruin and repair follow shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. But he is not without resources, namely his wit, his ex-wife, and his irrepressible soul, which in its own way is reminiscent of another bighearted broken man of literature: Saul Bellow's Herzog. Finally, he is a man prone to luck both bad and good, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his own past shows up, the plot of his life comes into sharp focus. Steve Tesich has grounded his story in the highly recognizable world of New York in the late-eighties, a milieu of unscrupulous producers from the West Coast, dry cleaning, divorce, and fantasies of escape. Karoo is a haunting, highly human, deliciously real novel of decline and fall and rejuvenation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There are far more tragicomic possibilities in the lives of gracelessly aging men than one might suspect, and the list of writers who have taken advantage of them is small but fertile--Mordecai Richler, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow among them. The late Steve Tesich, best known for his original screenplay for Breaking Away, joins this august group with the tale of Saul Karoo, a wealthy, alcoholic Hollywood script doctor plagued by exactly the kind of banal problems that he has ruthlessly edited out of the scripts of others--most notably a fear of intimacy. He meets regularly with his estranged wife Dianah to discuss the academic question of their ever-impending divorce and celebrate the anniversary of their separation. "Tender, deeply felt, full of love, that's the kind of divorce we had in mind... The more we talked about divorce, the more married we seemed." His adopted teenage son, Billy, keeps pushing for more dedicated father-son contact, to Karoo's great discomfort: "I loved Billy, but I was absolutely incapable of loving him in private where it was just the two of us. That was another disease I had... Evasion of privacy. Evasion at all cost of privacy of any kind. With anyone."

A doctor tells Karoo that he's shrinking vertically and swelling horizontally, as if to push the world even further away. But when he signs on to re-cut the last film of dying directorial great Arthur Houseman, he discovers Leila, Billy's natural mother, playing a bit part in the film, and from that moment he's transformed. In a bizarre twist, the unbelievable melodrama that follows from his attempt to engineer happiness from this coincidence is the stuff of a blockbuster script--offered to him, naturally, for the writing. Karoo is bitter and cynical to the core, but the somewhat heavy-handed ending embraces the possibility of redemption even as it delivers the final insult to its unhappy hero. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Early in this hilarious novel, readers will be laughing out loud, but Tesich is ultimately quite serious about reminding us that moments or years of "unlove" can never be set right. Wisecracking narrator Saul Karoo, a Hollywood script doctor living in New York, is a heavy drinker and smoker, a hypochondriac who refuses to get health insurance because he "no longer has his health." In the novel's opening scene, Karoo spends the last Christmas party of the 1980s wondering how he can avoid taking his adopted, college-age son, Billy, home with him that night (he succeeds, after a fashion, by taking home a sloshed young woman instead). Billy's goal is to connect with his father, but Karoo evades intimacy on every level as steadfastly as he ducks the truth: he lies constantly, yet his first-person narrative reveals an entertaining man at once sensitive and indifferent. Haunted by the harm he's done, he longs to reform but seems incapable of playing the game straight. Meanwhile, Machiavellian superproducer Jay Cromwell (who makes Karoo look like a "moral force of his time") sends him an unreleased film by venerable director Arthur Houseman. Karoo recognizes that the film is a masterpiece, but Cromwell wants him to restructure it?a process that has in the past led to one screenwriter's suicide. Karoo refuses the Houseman film until the cassette leads him to Billy's biological mother and he suddenly thinks he sees a way to make everyone happy. Tesich (Summer Crossing, and many screenplays, including Academy Award-winning Breaking Away) knew New York and Hollywood well. The movie-making scenes here are classic. Even though the end of this posthumously published novel doesn't live up to the humor and poignancy of the rest, Tesich's memorable characters, particularly Karoo, will endure.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press, Open City Books (April 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890447374
• ISBN-13: 978-1890447373
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #326,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the read, April 24, 2001

By 

Jessica A. Miller (Media, PA US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Karoo: A Novel (Hardcover)

It took me more than one shot to get through this book, but I was glad I did. I think that the hopelessness of the main character made it difficult to get into at first--it was hard to like him, and a little difficult to care what happened to him. But once I got into the story, I truly enjoyed it. Tesich does an amazing job of filling a book with characters that aren't really all that likeable--he puts you inside their heads and shows you their motivations. They are all full of crap, but they convince themselves that their motives are pure--this can be laughable and completely disheartening at the same time. The story gained momentum, and (knowing that it couldn't possibly end well) I was torn between digging my heels in and letting myself get swept up. The ending left me feeling like I was trying to swallow cotton balls. It was a redemption story without the redemption, a portrait of a possibly souless man...I highly recommend this book, but not to anyone who's looking for a warm-fuzzy feeling about humankind.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True Masterpiece, October 30, 2000

By 

Harrison Wein (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Karoo: A Novel (Hardcover)

"Karoo" portrays a character with no core, a gambit which could easily become tiresome. But this book is more than a great portrait of a self-destructive character, which it certainly is. It manages to be a deep, thoughtful and heartfelt meditation on our media culture and how it affects our lives. Even the way "Karoo" is written challenges the way we accept the simplistic portrayals of life that bombard us daily. Often in life there is no neat resolution. This narrative, likewise, constantly confounds our expectations, just as life constantly confounds Saul Karoo's. Nothing is neat in this book, and we never know what to expect next. Minor characters come and go. Plot lines are left dangling. Things don't work out. Still we follow Karoo through his ill-fated plans and still we care for him. And Tesich makes it all make sense somehow.

Something of a post-modern "Babbitt" (Tesich does mention that novel's author, Sinclair Lewis, late in the book), the power and depth of this book are considerable. I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's a shame that Steve Tesich is no longer with us to give us more thought-provoking, relevant fiction like "Karoo".

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy it, Steal it, Read it!, June 17, 2001

By 

Bob Sweeney (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Karoo: A Novel (Hardcover)

Quite simply, one of the best books I have read. Tesichs' insights, observations, and descriptions of situations are so disturbingly real, you find yourself alternately hating/loving Saul Karoo, the subject of the novel. Karoo is described as something of an anti-hero, however 'Everyman' would be more apt as I defy anyone who reads this book not to identify with him in any number of situations - some humorous, others poignant, but all of them true to life. Follow the trail of (ex?)alcoholic Karoo from parties to restaurants to meetings and try and NOT see yourself in at least one of these cleverly written pages - some 'laugh out loud', others a bit close to the bone, but always an eye-opener in his slightly surreal world. A real page turner. One of those books that you hate to finish.