The Partisan

by Benjamin Cheever

A wildly new comic novel by the author of The Plagiarist. The revered author of 17 novels, all published by a small firm whose main source of profits is its sales of farm equipment catalogs, is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0241002311
• ISBN13: 9780241002315
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Atheneum
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Humor with a gentle bite

The wry, melancholy humor of Cheever's first novel, "The Plagiarist," serves him equally well in this second. The narrator, Nelson, is a film student, spending his summer taking classified ads at the weekly shopper. He sends his unattainable love daily picture postcards, portraits of Geronimo. "I had a box of fifty copies of the same card. She wouldn't have to read the message to know it was me." At the center of his story is, surprise, a crusty old writer, Nelson's "Uncle," or adoptive father, Jonas Collingwood. Jonas has labored in obscurity all his life until one of his novels is touted as a veiled memoir of his years in the Italian resistance during World War II. Suddenly he's a modern Hemingway. His publisher, a producer of farm equipment catalogues, is bought out by a conglomerate and Jonas is given a huge advance to write his autobiography. He throws the $75,000 check in a drawer and the sound of typing in the root cellar ceases while books on the era, from Farley Mowat's "And No Birds Sang" to Alistair MacLean's "Partisans" accumulate in piles on the floor. Into this cluttered picture comes a smooth, articulate stranger bearing gifts and adulation. But not until Jonas' beautiful sister-in-law requires extrication from bankruptcy does Jonas' muse respond. Cheever's feel for character and detail is unerring, from Jonas' ambiguously barbed Christmas presents to the classics he presses on reporters as unassailable bribes; from the former cop who spies on Nelson for the shopper's absentee owners to the childhood friend who seems determined to become a battered wife. Nelson's wayward sister Narcissus and his "Aunt" Elspeth retain a hint of mystery in their own well-defined eccentricities and play incisive parts in a resolution which raises courage from a maudlin welter of family secrets. Cheever's humor - one-liners and exaggerations tempered by empathy and sadness - serves him well in his exploration of the complex mess of life.