Nerve Damage

by Peter Abrahams

Book Overview

Sometimes the dead live on in your dreams . . . at least that's true for Roy Valois. His wife, Delia, died fifteen years earlier while working for a private think tank and he has never forgotten her.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061137979
• ISBN13: 9780061137976
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Abrahams, the Consummate Pro

In an interview, Peter Abrahams once said that his one main rule for writing is, "Do something original on every page." NERVE DAMAGE is another excellent illustration of this rule in practice. The story of an artist racing against terminal illness to discover the truth behind his wife's death, the novel is insanely smart and furiously compelling with dialogue that crackles like a sparkler; but as always the real treat is the writing. Never fancy, always cat-quick and often snort-your-soda funny, Abraham's prose moves like judo across the page, using the weight of the reader's interest to propel the tale forward without ever seeming to break a sweat. His protagonist's vision of the world, precisely observed and wholly unsentimental, rings fundamentally true, and Abrahams uses the least assuming details to enormously successful effect. If NERVE DAMAGE is your first Abrahams book, I envy you -- it's like walking into a bar, sitting down and having the Beatles in their prime come up onstage for an unannounced set of their greatest songs, playing for two hours and packing up their kits. Abrahams is the consummate pro.

Thrilling

Simply put: a page turner. I couln't put the book down. The author is a genius of suspense... I felt like a fish trying to get a piece of bait.

You can't turn the pages fast enough

"Sometimes the dead live on in your dreams." A nice start to the first suspense novel I've opened in years. I pressed on. It turns out that Roy Valois is dreaming of Delia. He reaches out to touch her hair. Ooops. It's Jen in his bed, and, first thing in the morning, she has news: She's been offered a job running the ski school in Keystone. That's in Colorado. Right now, they're living in Vermont. A significant distance. Especially because they've been dating for two years --- and marriage is very much on his mind. Roy calls and reserves a table at the town's best restaurant for dinner a few days later. This won't be like the last time, in the tiny Washington apartment, when he just blurted out his proposal to Delia. I look up. I've read two-and-a-half pages in less than a minute, and I already know a great deal. In another paragraph I know more. Roy lives in a barn he bought with Delia. He's a sculptor, working in large slabs of metal. Delia was an economist at the Hobbes Institute, a think tank that focuses on third world problems. But enough of the past. Roy's working on a masterpiece that he's named after his late wife. (She died, Peter Abrahams tells us almost as an aside, fifteen years ago, in a helicopter crash off Nicaragua on a trip to convince farmers to plant pineapples.) He also plays amateur hockey. And is soon reminded of a famous goal he scored in college. Will that glorious undergraduate moment be mentioned in his New York Times obituary --- or will it be art art art? Obits of the famous generally are written years, even decades, before the actual death; a local kid volunteers to hack into the newspaper's files. He finds Roy's obit: no mention of the hockey goal. But there is an incorrect description of Delia. According to the Times, she was employed by the United Nations, not the Hobbes Institute. Roy's annoyed by that mistake. So he calls the Times reporter and.... And now an hour has gone by and I've read a third of the book. (This doesn't happen when I'm reading James Salter.) Another 90 minutes and I'm done. The sun is now angled low, the afternoon has cooled. But I've read an exciting book and I'm red hot. Who is Peter Abrahams? Stephen King's favorite suspense writer. Well, lucky me: I started at the top. I check out his web site, where he lists his literary influences: Nabokov is one of my favorites. The sheer brilliance! He makes it look so easy....Closer to my own field, I've been influenced by Graham Greene... Greene, I'd expect. But Nabokov? To love "Pale Fire" and then write suspense thrillers? I'm not going to argue. Peter Abrahams has written 18 novels so far. A cursory scan of the reviews suggests they're uniformly superior. I have my work --- correction: my pleasure --- cut out for me.

Clear Your Schedule

If you plan to read this book, clear your schedule because you won't want to do anything else until it's done. It grips you immediately. I just HAD to find out the truth and was compelled to keep reading late into the night. I thought END OF STORY was okay and loved OBLIVION, but NERVE DAMAGE is definitely Abraham's best novel yet. He has quickly become a must-read author for me, right up there with Harlan Coben.

A Cousin to Oblivion

What can I say about Abrahams that I've never said before? Beyond a doubt he is one of the best suspense writers of the past twenty years, and I can't think of many in the past century that I prefer. His plots are labyrinthine and his twists and turns razor sharp, but he never leaves the reader behind in a spurt of cleverness. We always feel that we''re discovering the buried secrets with the same alacrity as his endearing everyday heroes and heroines. There are no loose ends anywhere, for he makes every word count like the most brilliant poets and aphorists. Plus, even at their worst, his people are real, you might meet them every day at the grocery store--or at Tiffanys I suppose for his superrich. But most of his men and women are just scraping by, emotionally if not financially. Take Roy Valois, the sculptor hero of his latest novel NERVE DAMAGE. Valois is a successful artist by any measure, sort of a heroic Richard Serra type whose huge metal constructions have won him a museum following and a devoted gallerist (Krishna his name is) who performs the lowly functions like courting collectors and taking off his fifty per cent off the top. Roy is dating an attractive ski instructor, Jen (sort of a Jen Aniston type) and thinking of asking for her hand in marriage, but if he's honest with himself, he knows that he's not 100% over with the memory of Delia Stern, the wife who died in a tragic chopper crash some fifteen years ago, in Venezuela, where she was working as an enonomist on the staff of the Hobbes Institute, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to alleviating hunger and global warming in Third World countries. Roy works far from New York, in a foundry slash studio in far off, small town Vermont, where the townspeople respect him almost as much as if he was a native. Suddenly bits and pieces of his marriage to Delia come flooding into his brain, and he begins suffering from a peculiar sort of nerve damage that affects his appetite and his sleep patterns. If you've read OBLIVION, you'll see why I think NERVE DAMAGE the other side of OBLIVION's coin. In OBLIVION, our hero suffered from a weird progressive amnesia, in which he forgot more and more everyday, until like the hero of MEMENTO he had to write down everything he knew in a way that would make sense to him when he regained his powers of thought. In NERVE DAMAGE, Roy's loss is even more keen, for he becomes convinced that his beloved wife might be nearer to him than he knows, if only he can live long enough to find her, to sense her presence with the same acute knowledge with which he's lived all these years in her absence. A New York Times reporter, working on a standard obituary for Roy, becomes involved in the mystery regarding Delia's death, and this fellow and his boyfriend, Jerry, find themselves up to their necks in an unbelievable intrigue. It's simple to say, you won't be able to put this book down, but please, those of you who are involved in relationships, or thos