Loose Ends: A Novel [Hardcover]

Neal Bowers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2001

A distraught Davis Banks arrives home for his mother’s funeral. Davis teaches poetry at a small college. He loves words — but not himself. His father had died some years before, and now Davis discovers a lot of little things in his mother’s house that don’t seem right.

Where are the keys to her car? In fact, he realizes he doesn’t even know how or where she died.

That night he visits his mother’s gravesite, dug next to his father’s. Near the bottom he discovers a man’s arm sticking out of the dirt where his father’s coffin is supposed to be. And when he finds out that his mother apparently died in a motel room with another man, he’s confronted with a myriad of loose ends thrashing about in a quicksand of details.

With a poet’s feel for language, Neal Bowers tells a story whose twists intrigue the reader as much as they do Davis.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bowers's previous book, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, chronicled his attempts to track down a man named David Jones who plagiarized a number of Bowers's poems and hoodwinked literary journals into publishing them. If only the plot for this first novel from the highly regarded poet and nonfiction writer proved as gripping. Davis Banks occupies the lowest rung of the academic ladder, toiling as an adjunct professor at a junior college in Iowa. He's also a diabetic and a compulsive liar. When his mother dies, Davis returns to Clarksville, Tenn., for the burial. There he runs into Ann Louise Wilson, a high school classmate and now a Clarksville police officer. Taking up residence in his mother's empty house, Davis delves into her life and learnsAvia a purse filled with condoms and cigarettesAthat she wasn't the shy, retiring woman he thought. Meanwhile, the discovery of a stray corpse near the Bankses' family plot sends Ann Louise and Davis investigating a cold murder case. Throw in Davis's ping-ponging diabetes, the inevitable affair with Ann Louise, her jealous ex-husband and Davis's search for his mother's lover, and the book develops more plot lines than it can comfortably handle. Fans of Bowers's poems may find themselves gratified by the imagery, but most of them will hope that Bowers will rededicate himself to poetry. (Mar. 16)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Davis Banks, a part-time, temporary, adjunct, visiting assistant professor of literature at a junior college in the Midwest, has received news of his mother's death and is on his way to Tennessee to arrange her funeral. An amateur con man, he soon finds that his stories pale in comparison with the secrets his mother has been keeping. The first question arises when Banks realizes that he doesn't know where or how his mother died, and his efforts to find out only raise more questions, including the identity of the man in his father's grave. As he travels around Clarksville in search of answers, he meets a man who may have been his mother's lover and is reunited with an old friend from high school, now a homicide detective, who helps him uncover some facts about his mother's life and death. First novelist Bowers, the author of six books of nonfiction and poetry, has a flare for Southern dialog and an understanding of the rituals of family in the South. He has drawn Banks as a less-than-sympathetic character whom the reader still cares about even when he is self-destructive. Recommended for public libraries and libraries specializing in Southern literature. Kerie Lynn Nickel, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, Leonardtown
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (March 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375504990
• ISBN-13: 978-0375504990
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,946,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Anxiously readable, March 30, 2001

By 

Richard A. Levine "[e-mail]" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Loose Ends: A Novel (Hardcover)

I breezed through this book in two evenings. Anyone interested in a quick, enjoyable read should pick it up. The characters probably aren't people that you know, but that makes it all the more worthwhile. Throughout the story, Bowers is able to instill a feeling of uneasiness or anxiousness in the reader that kept me flipping the pages to try and squash it.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quick, enjoyable, but not quite satifying, April 11, 2001

By 

Donovan Chase (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Loose Ends: A Novel (Hardcover)

Neal Bowers first novel length fiction effort is a smart, funny, and emotionally loaded book. Bowers does a wonderful job with his diabetic narrator and his desire to invent a more interesting life for himself. Bowers, like David Lodge, sneaks in a few in jokes for those exposed to English Acadame, but the novel itself is wonderfully accessible.

That being said, despite what may seem to be an outlandish premise by discovering another man's body in his father's grave, the rest of the book is predictable from that point onward. There are few, if any surprises beyond the first fifty pages, and as such it takes some of the emotional punch out of the character arc.

That being said, the prose is a joy to read, the wit compelling, and the time spent on the book was well worth it, but it is not MUST HAVE reading.

4.0 out of 5 stars A diabetic thriller, March 25, 2009

By 

Timothy J. Bazzett "ReedCityBoy" (Reed City, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Loose Ends: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the first mystery I have read that featured diabetes so prominently. I didn't know much about the disease or its potentially debilitating effects until I read LOOSE ENDS. Davis Banks is an interesting creation and I guess I'd have to say this is a page-turner, because I kept turning 'em, and even took it with me to the loo, when I couldn't wait any longer. This novel has all the vital elements: sex (sorta), violence (mild), and drugs (well, insulin) - and I think there was even some rock an' roll in there - or was it country-western? I just finished reading two other books by Bowers: a volume of poems (Out of the South); a true-life mystery-thriller about plagiarism (Words for the Taking), of all things; and this book. And I would rank them in that order. His poems are superb. The plagiarism book is compellingly creepy. This book kept my attention, although the ending seemed just a little ... Well, inconclusive, I guess. Banks is, I would say, a good character in search of a slightly better story. Having said that, this is still a book worth reading. - Tim Bazzett, author of Pinhead: A Love Story