Six Figures [Hardcover]

Fred Leebron (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2000

With Six Figures, Fred Leebron has written an intricately nuanced novel of psychological investigation and suspense, riveting in the depth and intensity of the questions it raises about ourselves -- and about our status-obsessed society.

Warner Lutz isn't sure how he got where he is, but he's not particularly happy to be there: midthirties, married, two kids, dead-end career in fund-raising, cramped town house, old Honda, clothes slightly frayed around the edges. His latest job has landed him and his family in Charlotte, North Carolina, a boomtown where everyone else seems to have more than Warner -- and more is what Warner wants.

But it's not what he gets. Instead, the probation period of his job has just been extended; his wife, Megan, thinks her own job is in jeopardy as well; their entire savings are going toward a house that won't be big enough for them; and their four-year-old daughter, the preschool teacher tells them, is "a couple of beats behind" the other children. In fact, there isn't one part of Warner's life that's going the way he'd planned.

But are his disappointment and frustration powerful enough to trigger murderous anger?

When Megan is viciously attacked and Warner emerges as the prime suspect, the answer might be yes ("This was how it happened, this was how their lives unraveled, this was how you realized you didn't have it so bad in the first place"). Now, as disbelief and distrust poison relations with family, friends, and colleagues, Warner struggles to understand how he has become a man whom others -- and, more appallingly, he himself -- could believe capable of committing such a crime.

With realism and emotional honesty, Six Figures gives us the story -- both powerful and disturbing -- of a family caught in complex and ambiguous turmoil.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fred G. Leebron's remarkable novel takes place in the chain-restaurant mecca of Charlotte, North Carolina, in a cramped, shabby house where Warner Lutz can't stop mulling over his rage and his many failures. His wife, Megan, tries to keep him smiling, but he lives up to his role as "the most negative person she'd ever met." Sometimes his two children cause glimmerings of life in his burned-out soul, but more often they are crying, soiling their pants, asking stupid questions over and over. For readers on the verge of entering marriage and family life, Six Figures could make even the most stoic turn and run in the other direction. The creeped-out hangover this novel leaves is a testament to Leebron's great powers. Like John Cheever, he makes you wonder if maybe the whole thing--putting kids to sleep, having dinner, lovemaking, trying to make enough money--isn't all somehow a slow and terminal act of violence. Warner loses it one Saturday morning, after drinking a double vodka for breakfast and helping his wife change their baby boy. While his daughter and wife look on, he gets to his knees and tries to squeeze himself into a space underneath the crib:

He was too thick to fit under the crib. He pulled out the activity blanket and tried again. The metal latticework hooked itself the length of the mattress. He poked at the white bedding. "I'm down here," he said. "Down here. Here."

Leebron has written one previous novel, Out West, and has won all the big prizes and taught at all the good workshops. For those in the literary world who wagered on him, Six Figures is proof that he was a good bet. It is a novel so quintessentially modern, and so carefully crafted that it's almost impossible to put down. This is not because Warner is a "likable" character (he's frequently detestable) or because a lot happens (aside from one terrible crime two thirds into the book, not much does). Six Figures succeeds because of the way rage seeps into the humdrum world Warner occupies; the way his little gripes build one upon another until they seem on the verge of killing him, or those around him. Leebron has written a book that runs over the reader like a tidal wave, even as his impeccable prose lulls you like a calm sea. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

Warner Lutz was "the most negative person" when his wife, Megan, first met him in grad school. Now he's 35, with two small children and a stultifying job, and what might have once been griping, vague discontent has become a bitter unhappiness. Though Warner makes a decent living fund-raising for a nonprofit organization in thriving Charlotte, N.C., the Lutz family, with a junky car and a cramped townhouse, is still scraping for cash amid their affluent neighbors. Warner longs for a home large enough for his wife and his two small children, preschooler Sophie and baby Daniel, while at the same time mourning his lost freedom. Megan, herself struggling in a low-paying job at an art gallery, becomes a focus of Warner's anger and frustration. He blames her for starting a family, for their hectic, dreary lives. When she is gravely injured in a violent attack during a break-in at the gallery, suspicion falls on Warner, who maintains his innocence though friends and family turn against him. In his first novel, Out West, Leebron painted a dark portrait of two ordinary young people who stumble into murder. Here, he treads the same psychological ground, delivering a misanthropic but likable protagonist who just might be a killer. With its fast pace and deft characterizations, this narrative is a gripping one-sitting read. But Leebron also invests the story with real depth and warmth. Warner is both tender and resentful toward his children and his wife, and the reader alternates between sympathy for his character and horror at what he might have done. This magnetic tale eludes tidy resolution, providing instead intriguing questions about whether anyone can really trust the ones they love. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (March 21, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375406409
• ISBN-13: 978-0375406409
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,868,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Story; An Engaging Novel, June 25, 2000

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Six Figures (Hardcover)

Six Figures is an interesting and enjoyable read, quick, but with substance. It is the story of Warner and Megan a not so happily married couple, living on the fringes of Charlotte NC's successes with their two young children. The stresses on their marriage ring true and any married person with young kids will recognize them. The daily grind of diapers, preschool, the depressingness of seeing others so much more successful, driving new Volvos when your Honda is falling apart. Leebron doesn't dwell on any of this envy, this unhappy marriage-ness for too long, he delves in and out of his characters heads so the reader gets a flavor of their misery without without making the reader miserable. Megan is then brutally attacked and near death. Warner is the only suspect. Leebron then explores what happens to the marriage, and the family after it is torn apart by the attack.

We never really, truly know if Warner did it or not, but that's OK. It's not necessary because this novel is not a mystery-thriller, it is a story of marriage and of family. What makes this book so enjoyable is the total believability of all of Leebron's characters and their relationships. We have met people like them and have felt like them many times. Warner is not exactly a likeable guy, but he's not awful either, probably because the envy he feels is something we have all felt at one time or another.

Six Figures is a satisfying read. I am surprised at, and have to disagree with, the negative reviews at this website. Give this book a read, I don't think you will regret it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A family in trouble, October 3, 2001

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Six Figures (Hardcover)

This is an especially well-done examination of the nature of families in a time of crisis. The "six figures" of the title, despite the artwork on the cover, are not the members of the extended family (since there are nine of them, even ten, if you count the brother). More likely the six figures are the dream of yearly income that signifies success in our society.

The central character is Warner Lutz, a thirty-something yuppie who manages a fund-raising non-profit organization (at about $30,000 a year) in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is married to Megan, who tends a shop that sells art objects. They have two children, Sophia, who is four, and Daniel, who is perhaps two. At the crisis they are joined by Megan's mother, Nan, a high-powered business woman who does indeed command over six figures a year, Warner's mother, Ruth, a workaholic who doesn't entirely believe or trust her son, and her husband, Alan, who is fat and seventy and sleeps a lot. There is also Nan's estranged husband and his wife (who really play no part in the story).

The central event of the novel occurs about halfway through. It comes as a surprise, and therefore shouldn't be revealed here, and I won't. I will say that Warner is accused and most everyone, including the police, believe he is guilty. Leebron's narrative deliberately does not allow us to know. Leebron wants to examine the event and its aftermath and how it effects the family regardless of whether Warner is guilty or not; indeed it is important that the truth not be known. It appears that no one else could have done it, but it that proof? Leebron hints at why Warner might have done it, but Warner says he is innocent. He is not believed. His life falls apart.

There is a long preparation for this central event in which the circumstances of the Lutz's are slowly revealed. We experience the frustration of their careers, the demands of being working parents, the alienation that comes with being northerners in a southern town. He is from Pennsylvania, nominally Jewish. Megan is a New Yorker. Some events of the past are recalled and how they effect their lives at present and perhaps foreshadow events to come. He comes under pressure because of a financial impropriety not of his doing. Sophia has trouble at pre-school. They don't feel they are making enough money. And then the central event comes crashing down on them, perhaps putting their lives into perspective.

Leebron's style is a laudable attempt at a kind of realistic objectivity, an attitude toward his characters that is understanding, even forgiving, but without sentimentality. His prose is for the most part without flourish, without mannerism, the "invisible" style of the writer who does not want to detract from his story. The characterizations are vivid and, after a slow start, a fine tension is achieved that carries us to the conclusion. This is an excellent work, marred slightly by an incidental quality as though a short story were being stretched into a novel.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping and relentless, April 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Six Figures (Hardcover)

I picked up this book before bedtime, expecting to read a chapter or two and followed the luckless Lutz family all the way to the final page. Leebron's swift moving and understated style leaves you with an uneasy uncertainty right up to the end. Could Warner have attacked his wife? Did she betray him earlier with a family friend? Will they find a true new beginning in a new place or will their doubts follow them north? Do Megan and Warner stay together out of loyalty or inertia? And, to echo the mother-in-law does anyone really know anyone? An intense and unnerving book - just don't give it to anyone for a wedding gift. Six Figures really makes you think twice about this "Till death do we part" thing.