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Pete Dexter (born 1943) is an American novelist He was the recipient of the 1988 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel Paris Trout.
Biography
Dexter was born in Pontiac, Michigan. A former newspaper reporter, Dexter was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, under legendary editor Gil Spencer, and the Sacramento Bee. He began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which 30 drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely. The injuries, added to those he had suffered in traffic accidents and as an amateur boxer, left Dexter partially disabled and required years of corrective surgeries.
Dexter lives and writes on an island in the Puget Sound area of the state of Washington.
Pete Dexterâ??s novels teem with violent consequence; protagonists in his six books shoot and are shot, kill and are killed. This nihilism, and Dexterâ??s fine ability to avoid cliché, has led to a devoted readership. Although his books have not been bestsellers, most have remained in print.
In Dexterâ??s first book, Godâ??s Pocket (1983), he adopts the title neighborhood in Philadelphia and shows readers that characters do not have to be caricatures, even in oft-used settings: a bar, a newspaper office, a job site. Mickey Scarpato is the readerâ??s guide through the cloistered burg and its traumas, and he too is an outsider, there via a marriage to Jeanie, mother to the recently killed Leon. Leonâ??s death sparks an outcry by Richard Shellburn, a man of the people newspaper columnist, who is unable to feel true sentiment. His tired mannerisms and his cruise-control life are upset when he meets and falls for Jeanie, but thankfully Dexter avoids a standard resolution; we are shocked by Shellburnâ??s undoing, but since we are at home in the battleground neighborhood, readers are oddly settled by the outcome.¬ It is not a pleasant feeling, but Dexter was only hinting at his ability to make us comfortable in uncomfortable settings.
Deadwood was a western novel published by Random House one year after they tried to launch Cormac McCarthyâ??s Blood Meridian. Both books sold poorly, which must have seemed odd considering the huge success of Larry McMurtryâ??s Lonesome Dove. Deadwood concerns historic figures making their way in the Black Hills gold mining town that drew everyone who missed the rush of 1849 and those weary from the Civil War.
Dexter follows his two protagonists, Charley Utter and James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok into town. Charley and Bill are there to gamble and reflect; like todayâ??s high rollers, they judge the lay of the action and go about their business, leaving the improbable games of chance to suckers. Both men feel closer to death than to life, and Wild Billâ??s reflection, both of his tormented life and his trapeze artist bride Agnes, shows Dexter stretching his talent for articulating dissipating humanity. Bill is of course shot and killed, and Charley is left as our guide. Utter is intelligent and empathetic; he lives by a code that is re-calibrated every day, because every day in Deadwood brings about something new and horrible.
Paris Trout (1988) won Dexter the National Book Award for Fiction. Itâ??s a taut book with an unsparing title character. Readers are not asked to empathize or comprehend Paris as he maims, murders, sodomizes, and harasses his fellow Georgians. By now, something called the Dexter style is clear, but it's not in the prose of Paris Trout; rather, it is the cinematic quality of his scenes that keep a reader from turning (or wanting to turn) from the violence. Thankfully, this book has profound moments of inspiration, notably Hanna Troutâ??s emergence from her husband into an independent woman unafraid. Dexterâ??s skill, manifest in scenes that shock, also rears in comic settings, such as the playful habits of lawyer Carl Bonnerâ??s wife.
Brotherly Love (1991) is a return to Dexterâ??s Philadelphia and surrounding environs, and it is one of his lesser efforts. The conflicts endured by Peter Flood seem planned, and at times forced; perhaps this has to do with the gangster occupations of most main characters, and the reader is unable to remove accrued stereotypes. Dexter once said, responding to an interview question about plot, "if you try to steer it, it shows." But perhaps the lack of a firm narrative hand guiding these men diminishes the bookâ??s appeal.
Following the unremarkable The Paperboy (1995), a thin story and his only attempt to date at first person narration, Dexterâ??s Train was a welcome return, not to form but a new peak. All at once, the familiar setting of noir-era 1950s Los Angeles comes alive and becomes new, and shows the so-called genre masters (Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, James Ellroy) what horror can truly be done to fictional men and women in that setting. Often we meet people through Dexterâ??s brilliant technique of long, unnamed third person singular narration. When they come out of the he and she, Miller Packard, Lionel Walk, and Norah Still are as battered and honest as any character Dexter has formed. Walk and Packard are brought together in Dexterâ??s bond of choice â?? men often look outside their chosen walks of life for companionship in his books. Packard is called to investigate a brutal murder and rape, with Norah at first playing the meek survivor/victim. Her evolution, like that of Hanna Trout, is true to character and not to the thin plot of Train.
Works
Novels
- God's Pocket (1984)
- Deadwood (1986)
- Paris Trout (1988)
- Brotherly Love (1991)
- The Paperboy (1995) (1996 Literary Award, PEN Center USA)
- Train (2003)
Screenplays
- Paris Trout
- Rush (1991)
- Michael (1996)
- Mulholland Falls (1996)
External links
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