TRAIN: A NOVEL by Pete Dexter (2003) ~ SIGNED ~ First Edition, First Printing

Description: Signed, Brand New, First Edition, First Printing, Hardcover/Dust Jacket, List: $24.95, 280 pagesTrainbyPete DexterDexter is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Paris Trout and five other novels: God's Pocket, Deadwood, Brotherly Love, The Paperboy, and Train. He has been a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Sacramento Bee, and has contributed to many magazines, including Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. His screenplays include Rush and Mulholland Falls. Dexter was born in Michigan and raised in Georgia, Illinois, and eastern South Dakota. He lives on an island off the coast of Washington.Train was published on October 7, 2003.First Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED, in my presence, to full title page.No inscription; full signature only. BONUS: The dust jacket is protected by a clear, removable, mylar cover. Please only bid if you will pay within five days of auction's end.All domestic sales of $25 or more will be wrapped and shipped in a box.If requested, there is a $1.00 surcharge for all domestic orders below $25 shipped in a box.Shipping & Handling for USPS Media Mail is $5.49 (includes USPS Tracking).Additional books shipped together via USPS Media Mail are $1.50 per book.Shipping & Handling for USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate envelope is $9.95 (includes USPS Tracking).Shipping & Handling for USPS Priority Mail International Flat Rate envelope is $46.95.I provide the highest quality author signed, first edition books.100% authentic guaranteed - This is my COA "Certificate of Authenticity". I won't sell any signed book that I'm not 100% sure is hand signed by the author.I'm not happy unless you are!Please email any questions.Thanks!Book Description Los Angeles, 1953. Lionel Walk is a young black caddy at Brookline, the oldest, most exclusive country club in the city, where he is known by the nickname “Train.” A troubled, keenly intelligent kid with no particular interest in his own prodigious talent for the game, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut as he navigates his way between the careless hostility of his “totes” and the explosive brutality of the other caddies.Miller Packard, a sergeant with the San Diego police department, first appears on the boy’s horizon as a distracted gambler, bored with ordinary risks. Train names him the “Mile-Away Man” as they walk off the first tee, and even months later, when they have become partners of a sort and are winning high-stakes matches against golf hustlers all over the country, the Mile-Away Man is a puzzle to Train, remote and intimate, impulsive and thoughtful, often all at the same time.Packard is also a puzzle to Norah Still, the beautiful lone survivor of a terrifying yacht hijacking, who is both aroused and repulsed by his violent and detached manner at the crime scene. Packard himself feels no such ambiguity. He is unequivocally drawn to Norah – and perhaps to what has happened to her – and an odd, volatile triangle takes shape, Packard pulling the other two relentlessly into deeper water, away from what is safe. With his trademark economy of style, Dexter brings these characters to life in their most reckless, vulnerable moments, stripping away words and manners until all that is left is the basic human pulse. from Publishers WeeklyNational Book Award winner Dexter's Train is about pain: the men and women who deliver the emotional and physical blows and the limits of those who bend and break beneath them. This is a theme that runs like a dark thread through Dexter's work, from his prize-winning Paris Trout to The Paperboy. In his latest, no one escapes unscathed, and that includes the reader. It's 1953, and Lionel Walk, a black 18-year-old caddy known as Train, works at an exclusive Los Angeles golf course. The members there are cruel and bigoted, the other caddies violent and criminal. Train is badly treated by everyone except enigmatic golfer Miller Packard, who plays a decent game and recognizes that Train has a special talent for the sport. Packard is a police sergeant who comes to the rescue of beautiful Norah Rose when she is viciously attacked and her husband is slaughtered in an attempted boat hijacking. Packard and Norah fall in love, and he moves into her Beverly Hills home. Meanwhile, Train loses his job and eventually finds work as a groundskeeper at the rundown Paradise Developments golf course. He gets the course back into shape, but this hopeful interlude cannot last. A botched tree-removal project ends in tragic farce, and Train is set adrift again. Packard-a rescuer once more-finds Train, turns him into a golf shark and wins thousands on the boy's exceptional talent. In clear, pitch-perfect prose, Dexter moves the relentless story forward, exposing the ironies and dark undercurrents of charitable actions. The calamitous conclusion looms over Train from the start, and it comes just as the reader knows it must. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. from BooklistGolf and the noir novel--strange bedfellows on the surface, but maybe not so strange, after all. "Disappointment was the only thing about the game that lasted." So says Lionel "Train" Walk, a young black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club in 1953. Train is a self-taught golfer, too, and his natural ability catches the eye of an enigmatic cop, Miller Packard (or "Mile-Away Man," as Train dubs him). As the stories of Train, Packard, and Norah Still, the survivor of a yacht hijacking (and eventually, Packard's wife), interject and ultimately implode, Dexter painstakingly reminds us that noir is all about disappointment, too. Packard seems like a savior at first, nursing Norah back to psychic and sexual health and backing Train in a series of high-stakes golf matches, but is the Mile-Away Man really a quiet agent of chaos, carefully arranging the pieces of his electric train on a collision course? In the best noir tradition, Dexter isn't saying one way or the other, but he makes us flinch as we wait for the inevitable smash-up. Along the way, there are pleasures aplenty: superbly rendered characters, every detail just right, especially in the Of Mice and Men-like relationship between Train and Plural, a blind fighter whom he attempts to keep from harm. And, perhaps best of all, there's the golf: fitting naturally into its noir context, never sentimentalized but offering Train's doomed characters the occasional moment of purity on the road to disappointment. --Bill Ott. Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

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End Time: 2025-02-02T22:32:03.000Z

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