Three Dollars (Paperback, Main)

Australian Perlman's debut is a slow-starter, but its final third bracingly chronicles one male's stunned, compelling flail along the slippery slope to unearned poverty. Named Book of the Year in 1998 by The Age (an Australian periodical), the tale of Eddie Harnovey plays out in Melbourne, though he's clearly an Everyman of the West. In an intelligent, bitterly funny voice, he recalls his college training and early liaisons with Amanda, the daughter of a wealthy magnate, and with Tanya, his future wife. His father, mother, and sister also appear, but only an account of an uncle's death resonates with considerable power. Perlman's prose (and his story) really take off, though, once the spadework of personal background has been performed. Eddie becomes an environmental scientist with the government and marries the alluring, brilliant Tanya. As she struggles to complete a Ph.D. in economic history, he's assigned to write an impact statement on the Spensers Gulf refinery, a hoary, illegal complex owned by Amanda's father. Eddie and Tanya acquire the expected burdens and responsibilities (a mortgaged house, an unreliable car, the divorce of a couple close to them) and a beloved daughter, Abby. In quick succession, Abby becomes ill, Tanya makes her contribution to her family's history of depression, and Eddie finds the project entangling him in a thicket of jealousies and resentments that ultimately close him out of a job. But the shallow story of a virtuous hero swallowed by a faceless culture of greed is magnificently interwoven with Eddie's domestic and social concerns, giving the novel a delightful richness and tragic power. Creating a sophisticated, subtle voice - at times comic, elegiac, or philosophic - that intelligently and un-ironically wrestles with the battlements of 20th-century fortunes, Perlman shows himself to be a gifted writer of considerable promise. (Kirkus Reviews)

Eddie is an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of thirty-eight, with a wife, a child, and three dollars. How did he get that way? He is a university graduate. He married an attractive intelligent woman, his lover from university days. He is a good husband, father and son. At any other time the world would smile on him. But this is the nineties, and the world values other things. Angry, yet full of unexpected humour, Three Dollars chronicles a modern breach in the social contract, and the legacy of Thatcherism and Reaganomics and its effect on people and relationships. It is about a man's attempt to retain his humanity, his family and his sense of humour in grim and pitiless times; about what happens to people in our brave new world of downsizing, outsourcing and privatising.

General

Imprint:	Faber and Faber
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	August 1999
Authors:	Elliot Perlman
Dimensions:	200 x 130 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	368
Edition:	Main
ISBN-13:	978-0-571-19716-3
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-571-19716-7
Barcode:	9780571197163

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