Karoo

Saul Karoo thinks. But understanding eludes. He lusts. And sometimes with success. He drinks. But he cannot get drunk. Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgment, he ruins them all. Originally published in 1998, shortly after the author's untimely death, this splendid new paperback edition, with an introduction by E. L. Doctorow, brings to the spotlight a book of shining causticity, humor, insight, and originality. Ruin and repair follow shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. But he is not without resources, namely his wit, his ex-wife, and his irrepressible soul, which in its own way is reminiscent of another bighearted broken man of literature: Saul Bellow's Herzog. Finally, he is a man prone to luck both bad and good, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his own past shows up, the plot of his life comes into sharp focus. Steve Tesich has grounded his story in the highly recognizable world of New York in the late-eighties, a milieu of unscrupulous producers from the West Coast, dry cleaning, divorce, and fantasies of escape. Karoo is a haunting, highly human, deliciously real novel of decline and fall and rejuvenation.