After Gregory - Hardcover

Wright, Austin

3.31

29 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 188090912X ISBN 13: 9781880909126

Publisher: Baskerville Pub, 1994

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After surviving a failed suicide attempt, Gregory leaves his past behind, which may include murder, and builds a new life

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Sometimes indecipherable, often intriguing, this literary and existential mystery-within-a-novel may remind readers of the fiction of Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and other authors who chart the modern American search for identity. Wright's (Tony and Susan, 1993, etc.) book opens with a man writing about his life. The man reveals that he was formerly known as Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, who tried unsuccessfully to drown himself in the Ohio River. Fleeing a past that may have involved the murder of his neighbor with a hammer, he hitches rides east, assuming and discarding aliases along the way: Murray Bree, the hitchhiker, is traded for Stephen White, the typewriter-shop employee, and so on. When an eccentric billionaire summons him to his New York office and gives him a grant he can't refuse--$30 million to become yet another new person and cut all ties to the past--he becomes the miraculously fortunate Stephen Trace. Unfortunately for Trace, the detritus of Peter Gregory's life keeps resurfacing. When his benefactor dies in a plane crash and the company's successors come after Trace for his assets, he is forced to flee once again, this time back into the past for a dramatic reconciliation. Wright skillfully conveys how we choose to elude our pasts rather than face them, molding ourselves into different people for separate occasions. While at first we grumble over seemingly meaningless names, the literary games the author plays, and the rules he breaks, the story gains clarity and absorbs us after we start worrying about what the hero is going to do with his cash. Not a mystery in the conventional sense but certainly mysterious, Wright's novel challengingly suggests that we are all con artists in flight from ourselves. An intellectual wordsmith's whodunit. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Wright's fifth novel, a dark, allegorical parable about the links between identity, the past and the need to write, reads like a cross between Paul Auster's The Music of Chance and an episode of the '50s TV series The Millionaire. Peter Gregory is an English teacher at an Ohio high school who tries to drown himself after two events: an incident with a female student in which he's accused of statutory rape; and an auto accident in which he swerves into the wrong lane while inebriated and kills an entire family. But Gregory's survival instincts get the better of him and, after crawling out of the river, he decides to hitchhike across the country to New York and assume a new identity. While on the road, he encounters Machiavellian billionaire Jack Rome, who gives him a huge sum of money with the condition that he forfeit the cash if he attempts to go back and put his sordid past in order. Wright's (Tony and Susan) ruminations about the modern tendency to shed the past at a moment's notice and become instantly mobile strike a vital chord, and he offers a story with enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning pages. The female characters are strictly throwaways, though, and not much better is a stumbling subplot in which Rome makes Gregory go to Venice to rescue a young woman who's come under the spell of a religious cult. Ultimately, however, this novel-told mostly in the unusual second-person singular-is about writing as a way to reconcile our past with who and what we become; it's Wright's brief but stirring conclusion on this subject that makes the book so special.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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