The Breaks

by Richard Price

Overview

From the author of Clockers and Lush Life comes this "glorious, gritty comedy" (The New Yorker) Richard Price's The Breaks.

Peter Keller, first college grad from a working-class Yonkers family, thought he was on the road to success. Until no law school wanted him. As he watches his friends advance into promising careers, he jumps from job to job—-mail clerk, phone solicitor, stand-up comic—-until he breaks down and starts phoning in bomb threats on his own house. He's going to have to work hard to change the pattern of self-sabotage that has defined most of his life. And taking that job at his alma mater as a teacher of freshman comp and starting an affair with a violently psychotic ex-wife of a colleague probably won't help matters. Richard Price's brilliant comic novel is a classic tale of a young man trying to find his place in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312566517
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	8.06(w) x 5.54(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. Price was also awarded a Literature Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

October 12, 1949

Place of Birth:

Bronx, New York

Education:

B.A., Cornell University, 1971; M.F.A., Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

A glorious, gritty comedy.” —The New Yorker

“Richard Price is to fiction what Martin Scorsese is to film....He has a genuine gift; his style is energetic, his eye for catching the minutiae of pop culture is keen, he swings to the jangling rhythms of city life.” —The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

With its intricate characterization, a plot that weaves together two very different cultures, and a narrative enriched by fresh, often poignant dialogue, this is an extraordinary first novel. At its heart is the unusually close relationship betwen Clara, a Jamaican, and David Hart, who is eight years old when Clara enters his life. David's mother meets Clara in a Jamaican hotel, where the kind, wise woman is a chambermaid. The Harts are on a trip designed to lift Leona from the depression that has engulfed her since her infant daughter was found dead in her crib. Clara reaches out to Leona, soothing her in a way no one else has been able to, and the woman returns to Rye, N.Y., as the Hart's live-in housekeeper. Leona turns to spiritualism and philosophy to fight her inner emptiness, becoming estranged from her husband, who eventually moves out. It is then Clara who provides the only constancy in David's life. Yet the intensity of their friendship, and the dark secret of her past that Clara is determined to hide from David, creates an emotional chaos that is skillfully portrayed and finally resolved in this wonderful novel, which won the London Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers' Competition. November 21

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

When eight-year-old David Hart's baby sister is lost to crib death, his mother, Leona, withdraws into depression. David's father takes her on a recuperative vacation to Jamaica. David is left at home, feeling confused and abandoned. When they return, his parents bring Clara, a patois-speaking Jamaican with a mysterious past, to tend to David and keep their house in an upscale New York suburb. In the years that follow, Clara fills the emotional void in David, as his preoccupied parents separate and divorce. He enters adolescence with a deep attachment to Clara and a fascination for all things Jamaican, including the secrets of her past. Hardly your usual coming-of-age story, this smoothly written first novel is original and compelling. Recommended. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.

Library Journal