Shootout with Father
89 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paperback
Release Date:17 Apr 2002
ISBN:9781573661003
A richly textured novel built around the love-hate conflict between a father and his grown son
The story is told by the son, James, a sculptor of small objet d'art, miniature versions of the armor his father has spent a lifetime collecting. The father's ambiguities become the son's obsession and he finds himself digging deeper and deeper into his father's past in an effort to understand the man before he was a father. He discovers a student filled with romantic dreams and high hopes, a latent homosexual who, after a bizarre episode of dashed expectations, rejects his nature and builds a fortress of denial. These revelations come to light in a suspenseful, many-layered plot that is delivered with a remarkable mixture of sensitivity and biting wit. This work is vintage Hauser, an Oedipal companion piece to The Talking Room, recounting the astonishingly suicidal lengths to which the child in everyone will go to be acknowledged by his or her creator.
The story is told by the son, James, a sculptor of small objet d'art, miniature versions of the armor his father has spent a lifetime collecting. The father's ambiguities become the son's obsession and he finds himself digging deeper and deeper into his father's past in an effort to understand the man before he was a father. He discovers a student filled with romantic dreams and high hopes, a latent homosexual who, after a bizarre episode of dashed expectations, rejects his nature and builds a fortress of denial. These revelations come to light in a suspenseful, many-layered plot that is delivered with a remarkable mixture of sensitivity and biting wit. This work is vintage Hauser, an Oedipal companion piece to The Talking Room, recounting the astonishingly suicidal lengths to which the child in everyone will go to be acknowledged by his or her creator.
She succeeds in fusing the fantastic and the ordinary.'
—New York Times Book Review
In the course of her long career, Marianne Hauser published numerous works of fiction, including Prince Ishmael, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected by The New York Times as one of the year’s outstanding books. Her other books include Monique, Shadow Play in India, Dark Dominion, The Choir Invisible, A Lesson in Music, Me & My Mom, The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley, and The Talking Room. She died in June 2006, at the age of ninety-five.
