Spooner

by Pete Dexter

Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his step-son, a man he will never understand

(From Publisher).

Pete Dexter began his working life in a U.S. post office in New Orleans, Louisiana. He wasn’t very good at handling mail and quit, then caught on as a newspaper reporter in Florida, which he was also not very good at. He got married, and was not very good at that either. In Philadelphia he became a newspaper columnist, which he was pretty good at, and got divorced, which you would have to say he was good at because it cost only three hundred dollars. Dexter remarried, won the National Book Award and built a house in the desert so remote that is has not postal service. He’s out there six months a year, pecking away at the type writer, living proof of the adage “What goes around comes around”- that is, you quit the post office, pal, and the post office quits you.