At the start of DeWeese's engaging debut, Paul, a bank manager in the Pacific Northwest, loses his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, for a short time while trick-or-treating. After Miranda disappears 22 years later, on the day of her wedding, Paul begins a series of increasingly frustrating attempts to locate and talk with her. Unable to read relationship cues, Paul is often surprised or angered by the actions of those he thinks he knows well, including his now ex-wife, Sandra, and Grant, a friend who became his daughter's intended without his awareness. Paul's bank is robbed on the day of the wedding by the same man who robbed it two decades earlier, which adds to the trauma and confusion. Essentially decent, caring, and loyal, Paul is more valued than he suspects. Paul learns some valuable lessons as he retraces and re-evaluates his life in this insightful novel. (Mar.)
Dan DeWeese’s elegantly written novel tells the story—alternately joyful and heartbreaking—of a father coming to terms with what he’s made of his life. It’s one of those novels I know I’ll return to, and pass on, in admiration and delight.” — Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family
“In this assiduous, mysterious novel of a father’s doings on his daughter’s wedding day, Dan DeWeese gives us a portrait of one man’s alienation, self-doubt, passivity, and, ultimately, his redeeming passion. With admirable formal restraint and unyielding sympathy, DeWeese delivers a whole adult life in a day.” — Jon Raymond, author of Livability
“Oddly tense and ultimately, cleansingly sad, You Don’t Love This Man wrings an amazing amount of pathos out of one (only seemingly) ordinary life.” — Tom Bissell, author of The Father of All Things
“You Don’t Love This Man is an exquisite puzzle. . . . This remarkable first novel gives rise to another, purely pleasurable conundrum. Which is more gorgeous, more satisfying here, the story itself, or the language DeWeese uses to tell it?” — Mary Rechner, author of Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women
“The careful, unpretentious opening of You Don’t Love This Man can’t possibly belie the cataclysm of interpersonal drama it contains. . . . The story has left me in that strange place between emotional exhaustion and raw, refreshed excitement for life. This amazing novel is why novels exist.” — Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle
The careful, unpretentious opening of You Don’t Love This Man can’t possibly belie the cataclysm of interpersonal drama it contains. . . . The story has left me in that strange place between emotional exhaustion and raw, refreshed excitement for life. This amazing novel is why novels exist.
Oddly tense and ultimately, cleansingly sad, You Don’t Love This Man wrings an amazing amount of pathos out of one (only seemingly) ordinary life.
Dan DeWeese’s elegantly written novel tells the story—alternately joyful and heartbreaking—of a father coming to terms with what he’s made of his life. It’s one of those novels I know I’ll return to, and pass on, in admiration and delight.
In this assiduous, mysterious novel of a father’s doings on his daughter’s wedding day, Dan DeWeese gives us a portrait of one man’s alienation, self-doubt, passivity, and, ultimately, his redeeming passion. With admirable formal restraint and unyielding sympathy, DeWeese delivers a whole adult life in a day.
You Don’t Love This Man is an exquisite puzzle. . . . This remarkable first novel gives rise to another, purely pleasurable conundrum. Which is more gorgeous, more satisfying here, the story itself, or the language DeWeese uses to tell it?
The day a man's daughter is to be married is not the best day for someone to rob the bank he manages, but such are the circumstances in this literary debut.
Paul is a bank manager in an unnamed Pacific Northwest city, and DeWeese renders him as oddly disaffected and detached. Paul is divorced, but he's comfortable with his former wife, Sandra, and her new husband, at least until their 26-year-old daughter, Miranda, decides to marry Paul's best friend and contemporary, Grant. Now Paul is in debt to pay for a wedding he doesn't want to happen. The book chronicles that fateful wedding day, which is complicated by the robbery by the same bandit who held up the bank during Paul's first days on the job. Worse, Miranda has disappeared, and Paul sets out on a confused search to find her. Using first person and flashbacks to reveal seminal events, the author dissects Paul's life, beginning with his boyhood as the only child of a distracted single mother. Readers learn of Paul's courtship; watch as he relies on Grant for social and personal guidance; and empathize as he struggles with fatherhood. Paul is distanced and yet caring, alienated and yet self-aware, living as if he cannot reach those he loves most. At 49, he has become a curious mixture of melancholic acceptance and ironic appreciation. DeWeese deftly uses dialogue to reveal character, not only for Paul but also for Grant, Miranda and Sandra. He also brings to life minor characters such as Gina, who was Paul's sexual mentor during college, then Grant's one-time lover, and finally Miranda's employer. Another likable character is Catherine, an assistant at Paul's bank, who serves as a perfect foil to reveal Paul's loneliness.
Life, both mundane and off-kilter, is revealed in this fine novel about a man who may not be as lost as he thinks.
