The Obituary Writer [Paperback]

Porter Shreve (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2000

Gordie Hatch is twenty-two, charmingly naive, and certain that his first job as a writer for the ST LOUIS INDEPENDENT'S obituary page will be a stepping stone to a crackerjack career in journalism. The year is 1989, and Gordie watches helplessly while dramatic events -- the very events that could be his lucky break -- unfold in the world around him. But nothing can prepare him for the call he gets from Alicia Whiting, a young widow with an accent he can't quite place. When Gordie agrees to meet Alicia, against his better judgment, his journalistic curiosity quickly turns into an obsessive search for the outrageous truth behind the Whiting family. Shot through with affectionate humor and surprising twists and turns, THE OBITUARY WRITER introduces an author of enormous talent and heart. Porter Shreve brings a deft touch to the moments that mark a young person's entrance into the world, and a sharp eye to the ways in which the lead story can be wonderfully, seductively misleading.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his delicate and hilarious first novel, Porter Shreve paints a fast-moving tale about the grungy, romantic allure of newspaper work and the muddled conspiracy of nature and nurture in a young man's maturation. The Obituary Writer's narrator, Gordie Hatch, has papers in his blood: his late father was a crackerjack reporter, his mother a journalism-school secretary. His environment reeks of his avocation, too, from the bundled newspapers in his garage to his comforter, which bears old headlines like TITANIC SINKS, SACCO AND VANZETTI GUILTY, and LINDBERGH BABY KIDNAPPED. By age 8, Gordie is fully ready to grab the newspaperman's baton, or, more bluntly, to get a paper route. ("I grew up with a heightened sense of my own importance, which my mother encouraged," he says. Not least because she seems to have delivered far more papers than he.) In 1989, when he moves straight from J School into an entry-level position at the hallowed St. Louis Independent, Gordie experiences an eternal, embryonic sense of belonging within its perfectly stereotypical nerve center, one that might have housed his father.

Sometimes I'd swear I could sense him looking out through my eyes, a young reporter waiting for the flare in the sky that points to the great discovery. I'd stop at the rackety wire machines under the mural of Remington's Pony Express to scroll through the overnight news, then pick up a late edition from the stacks before taking the long, slow route to my desk.

But Gordie knows he can't afford to move slowly. His beat, the obituary desk, is either a stepping stone for the gifted or a place to park damaged has-beens. When he makes three crucial judgment errors in succession, he is suddenly ensnared by a Southern femme fatale--who lures him into an exquisitely drawn world of highly un-newsworthy bank clerks, dog shows, and bumbling small-town artistes. A far cry from the collapse of European communism, which his luckier colleagues get to cover. Though the final third of The Obituary Writer veers into formulaic suspense-novel territory at times, Gordie always remains engagingly self-aware and the novel's denouement is well worth a bit of tough sledding. Will our hero realign himself with his destined path? How strong is fate, exactly? We cannot say, Gentle Reader. You must uncork this fine, funny novel for yourself. --Jean Lenihan

From Publishers Weekly

Balancing lies and reality is a complex pursuit in Shreve's first novel, a poignant coming-of-age story centering on an aspiring journalist, Gordon Hatch, eager to live up to the standard set by his late father, a renowned reporter who covered John F. Kennedy's assassination and its aftermath. Gordie, 22, is presently a lowly obituary writer, a job he takes seriously, preparing a file of "advancers," obituaries of elderly famous people. He gets a phone call, which might be his first scoop and lucky break, from Alicia Whiting, a young widow, who pulls Gordie into the heart of her own pathological identity crisis. While trying to hide the truth of his humble job at the St. Louis Independent from his mother, who constantly compares his career to that of his father, and from Alicia, who quickly becomes his lover, Gordie weaves a web of lies nearly impossible to escape. But Gordie's web is nowhere near as complex as Alicia's, and as he faces some shocking truths about his lover, and about his parents, Gordie has to reevaluate the importance of truth itself. Although the story raises compelling questions about honesty and friendship, Gordie's epiphanies lack power, often falling flat: when Gordie finally appreciates the loyalty and support of his mother and his former girlfriend, he says, "It dawned on me that my mother and Thea were good, that they had wanted to see me on my birthday." Lucidly demonstrating the widening gulf between Gordie and those who love him, Shreve then offers disappointingly little to bridge it, particularly since the lies and betrayals exposed are devastating, though the ultimate surprise, the lynchpin of the plot, lacks credibility. Yet unexpected twists, the deft buildup of suspense and a clever premise sustain the momentum. Agent, Joe Regal. Author tour. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395981328
• ISBN-13: 978-0395981320
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,196,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Porter Shreve was born and grew up in Washington, DC. He spent several years in Chicago and currently lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, with his two children and his wife Bich Minh Nguyen, author of the memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner and the novel, Short Girls.

Shreve's first novel, The Obituary Writer, was a 2000 New York Times Notable Book and a Borders Original Voices selection. His second novel, Drives Like a Dream, was a 2005 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year and a People "Great Reads" selection. And his third novel, When the White House Was Ours, was a 2008 Chicago Tribune Book of the Year and a Reading Group Choices featured selection. He is working on a new novel based in part on a classic work of American fiction and set in Chicago of both the present day and the early 1900s.

Shreve has coedited six anthologies and published fiction, nonfiction, Op-Eds and book reviews in many journals, magazines and newspapers, including Witness, Northwest Review, Salon, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the New York Times. He has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and he currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Accidental Purchase..., July 12, 2000

By 

Quaker Annie "reader" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Obituary Writer (Paperback)

...while looking at books in a local bookstore, I had thumbed through this one and actually read the ending, then planned to put it back...good writing, but nothing I wanted to read.

But I forgot to put it back, as I stacked up books and there it was when I got home. I decided to read it anyway, even knowing the ending, and find that I'm glad I did.

Very well-written, with a clever, poignant plot, this is a story that will stick with you. The narrator is Gordie, a young writer who wants to achieve the same fast success his mother reminds him (constantly) that his deceased father managed to find.

It's hard to say what needs to be said about this very good book without giving things away.

Gordie starts at the bottom, as an obit writer, low-end in the newspaper world - under the supervision of an aging, failed writer and editors who stab at Gordie's eager ego every time he attempts to take short cuts to success.

His lies tangle with the lies of others, his pride encourages him to inflate himself and blinds him from the truths. His inexperience couples with his wish to succeed; he seduces himself into believing what he wants to believe (aided by Alicia, a young and recent widow who has ego needs of her own).

Inevitably, Gordie finds himself both caught in, and part of the cause of, a tragedy.

(Note: what a previous reviewer's comments mean -- about LBJ, cowboy songs and Vietnam -- is a mystery to me, for none of those things are in this book)

This story is one that is not just good to read, but causes you to reflect for a long time after finishing.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A subtle, good read, May 30, 2000

By 

Anthony Reed (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Obituary Writer (Paperback)

About halfway through The Obituary Writer, the main character's mother tells him: "I hated to lie, but I had to tell her something." That "saying something"-those stories with which we invent ourselves-is the organizing trope of Porter Shreve's first novel.

In 216 lean pages, we meet Gordon Hatch, an ambitious-to-a-fault aspiring journalist ca. 1989, paying his dues as an obituary writer for a St. Louis newspaper. We watch as he falls in love with the mysterious Alicia, who, like Gordon, is trying to find her place in the world. We watch as he botches another relationship, and we watch him finally get tangled in his own web of white lies. And we want badly for him to succeed.

Mr. Shreve handles his subject seriously, but with a light touch that seems almost self-effacing, as if perhaps he sees a bit of himself in his naïve twenty-something narrator. All of us can find some part of ourselves in this character, in over his head in situations he cannot fully grasp. Perhaps we all have watched helplessly while it seemed that control over our lives was wrested from our hands. Our ability and desire to empathize with Gordon and his desire to have "arrived" already, that makes it so much fun to be with him.

Ultimately, The Obituary Writer is a mystery involving the events surrounding the death of Alicia's husband, Arthur. Her story unravels as does the Eastern Bloc countries featured in the background as a constant reminder of the way people construct Iron Curtains, as it were, just as nations do. As Gordon first begins having doubts about Alicia, the Berlin Wall falls, reminding us that it is necessary eventually to remove those artificial boundaries (such as status) we construct around ourselves. As with any good mystery, The Obituary Writer makes sense of its twists and turns as it goes along. It is to Porter's credit that, as with real life, things remain tangled enough at the end that the novel stays with us after we have finished.

This is an author to keep your eye on.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't get this book out of my mind!, September 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Obituary Writer (Paperback)

Other reader reviews here say stuff like "quick easy read" or "good for a vacation." What's up with that? Anyone who thinks The Obituary Writer is a book you sit down and read once and that's it, is not reading so well. Sometimes reading takes a little work, especially when it comes to restraint and subtlety. (But then, I don't believe that readers should be lazy.)

Here's a thought: you don't have to write a spew-all non-edited-Zadie Smith type-Rushdie-knockoff to have a full and deep book.

I read The Obituary Writer a couple of months ago and it's still in my mind, especially Gordie Hatch the main character and also that ending! (Hey, a couple people gave away the ending in their reader reviews. That's not cool!!) In an intriguing way, the smoothness of this book is a challenge because it's deceptive. Because the events and characters sure are not quick/easy to read/ smooth.

I think this book deserves some major props!