Endorsements
"John L'Heureux is one of the truly valuable writers of his generation."
--O. Henry Awards
"John L'Heureux is a magnificent hold-out. In an age of
tour-de-force technique, three-ring-circus virtuosity, L'Heureux builds
stories the way the Shakers built chairs; in an age which has cut the
imagination free, an age of hippogriffs and seven-legged maidens, L'Heureux
sits, stodgy as old Chekhov, observing real human beings and putting them on
paper, pore by pore... A wise writer, with a wisdom as old as the
hills."
--John Gardner
"A moving book about the strange
zones of intersection between love and cruelty--from one of our finest
writers."
--Scott Turow (on Shrine)
"A writer who picks up his
readers by the scruff of the neck and won't let them go."
--Chicago Tribune
"A Master
storyteller...elegant, cunning, and wickedly funny."
--The Washington Post
Reviews
[for HAVING
EVERYTHING]
"In
his fourteenth novel, L'Heureux shines a light on the dark side of a
supremely accomplished man's life....L'Heureux is a masterful prose
stylist who creates full-bodied, flawed characters enmeshed in life's
problems." --Booklist
"Having Everything is a gracefully written, painfully familiar look
at adulthood. The writing is so sharp and clear, in fact, that
Having Everything is an Andrew Wyech painting of a novel, in which every
gesture, every blade of grass cuts through in some emotion, traveling a
distance from skin to heart that could exist only after at least four
decades of life..."
--Los Angeles Times
"A master of understated, ominous
moments in a marriage in which not asking a question can be more
disastrous than asking it. . . . Sharp, moving, poignant."
--Washington Post Book World
"John L'Heureux is perhaps
today's most frightening novelist because his characters, for all their
strange behavior, are not freaks or misfits. They are the people we see
and know. . . . Having Everything is an unforgettable exploration of
what it means to become fully human."
--Seattle Times
"A master of spoof and irony . .
. As the book moves forward to a conclusion that readers will sense is
going to be catastrophic, it is impossible to stop turning its
pages."
--Washington Times.
"Witty and interesting"
--Kirkus Reviews
[for THE MIRACLE]
"A
wry but revelatory look at the connection between faith and love . .
.L'Heureux's strength is his ability to expose the all-too-human foibles
and flaws of his outstanding ensemble cast, as he connects the dots with
short, punchy scenes that instantly get to the heart of the matter. As
usual, L'Heureux also looks unflinchingly at a variety of tough moral
issues, balancing the serious stuff with humor in a deceptively light
style that makes this book entertaining as well as challenging. . . . A
balanced, wise book built around the life of a priest in a time when the
clerical profession is under attack from a wide array of critics."
--Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
"A finely crafted story of a young priest's crisis of faith (and
love) is the latest success from . . . L'Heureux. Anybody who was
ordained in the 1960s faced pretty stiff casualty rates from the start,
and Father LeBlanc-idealistic, intellectual, liberal, and more than a
tad naïve-is the sort who is bound to find Church life hard going at
the best of times. . . . . [He] has to decide whether he should remain a
priest-and what he wants to do if he leaves-and, more importantly,
whether he still believes in God. Deeply moving and personal, told
with great restraint and skill."
--Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
[for AN HONORABLE PROFESSION]
Brilliant and complex...A
deeply ambitious novelist...who isn't afraid of dealing with dark themes
and what it means to be fully human, especially in the frightening and
ecstatic world we create behind the darkened bedroom walls."
--The New York Times Book Review
"An Honorable Profession is a
novel about survival both personal and professional, not merely that but
survival with dignity and self-respect. It is itself an honorable
novel."
--The Washington Post Book World
[for A WOMAN RUN MAD]
"Remind[s] one of Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark, or E. M.
Forster. Yet A Woman Run Mad is unlike any novel I know . . .
unusual intelligence and personality are alive throughout the
book."
--New York Times Book Review.
"Witty and literate . . . Grand
Guignol for grown-ups."
--Newsweek
"Unless you have
no interest in passions, the edge of madness, forbidden obsessions,
runaway libidos and dangerous desires Woman Run Mad will
fascinate you, from its title to its perfect final sentence. . . . A
thinking man's Fatal Attraction."
--Chicago
Sun-Times
"Normality -- as
our time understands the word -- and monstrosity are L'Heureux's poles,
and he joins them with extraordinary dexterity. . . . The ending is not
to be revealed."
--Los Angeles
Times Book Review
"A superior
suspense story . . . It is the kind of story that might well have
appealed to a writer like Patricia Highsmith, a drama of interlocking
obsessions."
--The New York Times
[for THE SHRINE AT ALTA MIRA]
"A powerfully effective piece of drama."
--The New York Times Book Review
Full Description:
Philip Tate is a man
who has everything -- youth, looks, a beautiful wife and perfect family,
a distinguished deanship at Harvard. Having Everything is the story of a
nighttime drive that leads Philip to jeopardize it all for a moment's
flirtation with the forbidden. For on that drive he will collide with
the Kizers -- beautiful, troubled Dixie and brilliant, kinky Hal. By
stepping, without knocking, into the Kizers' house and into the midst of
their sad marriage, Philip sets in motion the near ruin -- and perhaps
the salvation -- of his entire world. Fierce, ironic, and beautifully
told, Having Everything reminds us that sometimes -- in marriage, and in
life -- having everything is not enough.
(from Amazon)
Had Diogenes lived today, instead of
searching for an honest man, he would have been swinging his lantern in
hopes of hitting a well-balanced psychiatrist. Or so fiction would
generally have one believe. Psychiatrists in novels generally fall into
one of two categories: they are either cold, insensitive, and all-around
clueless when it comes to their nearest and dearest (see Fear
of Flying's
Benjamin Wing) or they are wackier than their patients--often in dark
and twisted ways. Philip Tate, the hero of John L'Heureux's Having
Everything, belongs to this second group. Married to a beautiful
woman, the father of two terrific children, and recently appointed to a
prestigious position at Harvard Medical School, Tate would seem to have
an ideal existence. Too ideal, of course, or there'd be nothing to write
a novel about:
They had everything, their kids and their lives and
their health, and they were good-looking, with enough money, and they loved
one another--didn't they?--and yet they were wrecking it, somehow, in spite
of themselves.
Tate's wife, Maggie, it seems, is an alcoholic. And
Tate himself struggles with the compulsion to break into stranger's houses;
one night, he goes too far, breaking into a colleague's house with
consequences that will haunt him through the rest of the novel. In Having
Everything, L'Heureux suggests that success is only skin deep, and
demonstrates how difficult it really is to have it all.
World
Rights: Contact Lukeman
Dramatic Rights:
Contact Lukeman
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