Poor George: A Novel [Paperback]

Paula Fox (Author), Jonathan Lethem (Author)

Book Description

Paula Fox’s stunning first novel—available for the first time since its initial publication in 1967.

Poor George gives us George Mecklin, a restless, soft-spoken teacher at a private school in Manhattan. Depressed by his life of vague moral purpose, George discovers a local adolescent named Ernest breaking into his house. Rather than hand the boy over to the police, as his nagging wife insists, George instead decides to tutor him. His life consequently implodes. Filled with vividly acid portrayals of American life in the 1960s, prescient explorations of suburban anomie, and a riotously disturbing cast of supporting characters, Poor George is a classic American novel—further reminder of Paula Fox’s astonishing literary gifts.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Like a sealed bottle of pure mid-Sixties. . . . feels fresher after a third of a century than most novels written yesterday. -- Jonathan Franzen

The best first novel I've read in quite a long time. -- Bernard Bergonzi, New York Review of Books

About the Author

Paula Fox is the author of Desperate Characters, The Widow’s Children, A Servant’s Tale, The God of Nightmares, Poor George, The Western Coast, and Borrowed Finery: A Memoir, among other books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (February 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393321312
• ISBN-13: 978-0393321319
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #804,119 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The uncovering of the wastelands of the spirit., December 16, 2004

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HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poor George: A Novel (Paperback)

George Mecklin is a teacher of English in New York. He is married to Emma, they're both in their early thirties and they live in the country, a small place called Harmon. George has got an unemployed and divorced sister, Lila. Claude is her young son. George goes to work, attends staff meetings, spends his evenings with Emma, worries about money...
It is precisely this uneventful way of life that makes Mrs Fox's novel interesting. It is the tedious and habitual way George leads his life, the utter emptiness and uselessness of his daily activities, almost as though he were living against his own volition. An "attitude of defeat" is a description used for Emma but it may equally adequately be applied to George, an attitude also shown by his clothes which hang on their hangers "like humble effigies of himself". Even his trying to help a lost youth, Ernest Jenkins, fails because George, "the goddamned fool", can only offer him dead heroes and dead poets. But George is lucid enough to be aware that he suffers from a profound disaffection with his life. "Poor George! I guess you have as many troubles as the rest of us" says one of the characters. Indeed, it is a novel about all the troubles one has to cope with in one's dreary everyday existence, masterfully put down on paper by Mrs Fox.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you read nothing else read Paula Fox, August 19, 2004

By 

N. Hamer "Henry Bemis" (Henry Bemis) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poor George: A Novel (Paperback)

Where has Paula Fox been all of my life? How was I to know her sentences listened and heard so clearly. She's so precise with her language and has no place for cant or the vocabulary of 'hyper realism'. If you read nothing else read Paula Fox. Thank you for reminding us how important the social novel is; some of us seem to have forgotten.

14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Man's Agonizing Search for Meaning, March 9, 2001

By 

M. JEFFREY MCMAHON "herculodge" (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Poor George: A Novel (Paperback)

Like Fox's masterpiece, Desperate Characters, the main character, George, is eviscerated from a lack of meaning in his life, in spite of his job as a teacher and his decent wife. A life devoted to provisionalism, prudence, hoarding, reason, the same kind of life embraced by the narrator in Melville's "Bartleby," proves to result in a spiritually bankrupt soul. George earnestly seeks in vain for meaning and in doing so the novel sheds light on the bleakness of provisionalism as the modernist philosophy which the American middle class championed so blindly in the 1960s, the era in which this novel is written. George may fail in his search for meaning, but the novel is a triumph of vigorous prose, muscular syntax, and an uncompromising, angry critique of the smug middle-class complacency that afflicts too many of us.