Customer Reviews

A Window Facing West: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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I usually don't care too much about the daily travails of white middle-aged men, but in this book, common-place events are heightened into hilarity and despair by the narrator's deadpan delivery. Well written, acute life observations, deeper relationship issues than one first assumes - and a quick, easy read. A peek into everyman's head. My husband and I rarely read the same books, but this is an exception. I Look forward to Tarlton's next one.

This is good writing. Fine steady hand. The novel starts out piquant and burlesque with some overgrown jockstrap snapping and then moves into bitter sweet levels of remorse, beauty, release and longing. Many of the late scenes stop you cold; poignance without pity or affectation. From "the Topless Patio" to the main character's -Gatlin's- father's final unraveling, scene after scene will stay with you long after Tarlton's considerable wit washes away.

Reads like actual conversations middle aged guys have about their wives and sex that the wives never know about. You wonder whether Tarleton has been tapping your phone. Funny and insightful. A great book to read on the plane. Don't let your wife find it.

John S. Tarlton's debut novel has a lot going for it: a generally likable, sometimes genuinely funny first-person narrator; a casual, unhurried, "philosophical" style that shuns unrealistic plot tricks; and a structure that mixes the simple chronology of the three days of the novel's "present" with memories of the narrator's troubled and finally suicidal father. But here's the rub: Mr. Tarlton, throughout _A Window Facing West_, is channeling the voice of the late Walker Percy. Figuratively, his literary window isn't facing west--it's pointed straight east toward Covington, where Percy lived for forty years until his death in 1990. From Tarlton's opening epigraph from Dante (Percy uses Dante to preface _Lancelot_), to the repetition of such Percian tag phrases as "all manner of folk" or "gold-green Louisiana afternoons"; to the theme of the deep wound a father's suicide leaves on his son, _A Window Facing West_ is unmistakably, persistently, derivative of Walker Percy. It's not possible that Tarlton is unaware of this influence, so the reader is left with two curious alternatives: either Tarlton is hoping that readers will not notice where his style came from, or he is hoping that they will. The former hope would seem a vain one for a Louisiana novelist who is going to be read mostly by a Louisiana audience and whose work will naturally invite comparisons to Louisiana's most celebrated, National Book Award-winning writer. The second alternative--that Tarlton wants his audience to recognize the voice of Percy in his work--is likewise curious. Serious writers, if they have anything, have a distinctive voice. A writer without one is the literary equivalent of a rock band that only does "covers" rather than original songs. Mr. Tarlton has apparently listened to Walker Percy closely and long, and even learned to sound a good bit like him. But that's not enough if he wants to hunt with the big dogs. Tarlton has a good ear, a good eye, and a good heart: he just needs to develop a distinctive voice.