Grace

by Calvin Baker

Overview

Harper Roland has abandoned his job as a war correspondent, and returned home a weary, jaded 37-year-old. Uncertain of the future but determined to move forward with his life, he begins a search for enduring love—hoping he will also regain the ability to see the beauty of the world.

Along the way, he meets an intellectually gifted but emotionally absent doctor, a beautiful Parisian artist who burns too hot to the touch, and a human rights lawyer who has left New York in search of a more centered life.

The novel's sweeping tale encompasses four continents—where prior assumptions are constantly tested, and men who cling too passionately to certainty unleash destruction—and ultimately leads Harper back to the chaos he was trying to escape. The result is a startlingly fresh view of the contemporary world, in which place and history are mere starting points for the deeper journey into the geography of the human heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440585753
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	07/04/2015
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Calvin Baker is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Naming the New World, Once Two Heroes, Dominion, and Grace, as well as the nonfiction book, A More Perfect Reunion. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of Leipzig, Germany. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

"The plot moves along nicely and with strong direction as we follow Roland through relationships with various existentially driven women.... The story is engaging.... The meditation in Baker's novel is compelling, and it begs us to look closer, to inspire important conversations and richer dialogue, to make better connections with people and to hold those connections up for observation." —Bookslut

Praise for the work of Calvin Baker

"Global, personal, and finally transcendental, Grace involves us completely in its hero's extraordinary quest for meaning. Calvin Baker has written a wonderful and deeply affecting novel." —Joesph O'Neill, author of Netherland

"Calvin Baker works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner and Morrison, Calvino and Cormack McCarthy: allegorists whose stories are tinged by parable and psalm even as their sensibility remains keenly attuned to the avant garde." —Dale Peck, author of Visions and Revisions and The Garden of Lost and Found

"In his long-waited and brilliant new novel, Grace, Calvin Baker offers us a soul-enlarging tale that blends exquisite language and profound insight in a way that only Baker could have written." —Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank

"Its veiled literary references—to J.M. Coetzee's 'Disgrace,' Homer's 'wine-dark sea' and Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver...hint strongly at the flavor and scale of Baker's ambition.... Grace...take[s] you places you wouldn't expect to go, by the most serendipitous path imaginable." —The Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

2015-04-15
An American man's existential journey is aided by various women in Baker's cerebral fourth novel (Dominion, 2006, etc.). Here's what we know about narrator Harper Roland: he's single; 37; only living relative is an aunt; lives in downtown Manhattan; burned out after seven years as a war correspondent for a small magazine. These details are thrown out casually, along with a hint that Harper is black. What matters is his emotional state, which is in flux. He's been dating Devi, an emergency room doctor, but wants something more intense than what she's willing to offer. He quits the magazine and flies to Paris to work on a screenplay for Davidson, an egotistical director of art-house movies. Intensity is waiting for him in the form of Genevieve, a bohemian beauty who declares, operatically, "you are my man." They live at fever pitch until, in another bolt from the blue, Genevieve has a breakdown and sets him free. Harper, who identifies with Oedipus, endures the reversal of fortune even though he's afflicted by "a vast, cosmic emptiness." This is assuaged by a trip to Rio to join a friend's bachelor party. In a brothel, he's charmed by a high-minded whore who ruminates on the soul/body connection before pleasuring Harper with the blend, but it's only further south, down Patagonia way, that he overcomes his dread of becoming another lost soul when he meets fellow American Sylvie, a constitutional lawyer, and feels "a great uprush of kindredness." Journey's end? Not quite. Baker tacks on a final section set in Africa. Harper is on safari with Sylvie when they're abducted by murderous, sociopathic guerrillas. What follows is standard-issue escape and pursuit, but the soul mates still find time to extol the cosmic energy of their first meeting. A muddled spiritual inventory that could have used a lighter touch.

Kirkus Reviews