Paris Trout - Softcover

Dexter, Pete

3.88

6,848 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006545475 ISBN 13: 9780006545477

Publisher: Flamingo, 1993

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A gothic tale of murder, injustice, and mayhem in a small Georgia town at the end of WW II, by the hypnotically gifted author of God's Pocket (1983) and Deadwood (1986). Paris Trout - a disheveled, miserly, eccentric, and amoral but nonetheless locally respectable hardware-store owner and loan shark - is the murderer; his victim is a 14-year-old black girl named Rosie Sayers, whom he kills in a shooting spree brought on by a black boy's failure to repay a loan. Much against the will of the comfortable Southern town, Trout's trial is a fair one, and he's sentenced to prison; but Trout is smart, wily, and resolute with a mad determination not to pay for something he doesn't consider to have been a crime - with the result that he bribes and blackmails his way out of jail, returning to the town as a living irritant to its inhabitants' consciences. But Trout grows madder: and, finally, urine-stained and utterly deluded. With a conviction that his estranged wife - a wonderful, stoical character by the name of Hannah Trout - is poisoning him, Trout holes up in the county courthouse during the town's sesquicentennial celebration and, having shot his stroke-ridden mother in the head ("I end my connections with everything that come before"), opens fire on the rest of his enemies: his lawyer, Harry Seagraves; his wife's divorce lawyer ("the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state"), and other local noteworthies and respectables. Once again, Dexter shows a mesmerizing mastery of character development, pace and tone; Cotton Point, Ga., lives and breathes, and Paris Trout menaces us and he menaces it. The larger message - that racism is a form of madness that overspills its boundaries - is murky; but this is nonetheless a fascinating read. (Kirkus Reviews)

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From the Back Cover:

'Paris Trout' is a white storekeeper and moneylender in the sleepy little town of Cotton Point, Georgia. He is also an implacable bigot. A long time ago he studied law, but he is no respecter of it. One hot summer’s day he invokes his own law, with devastating results.

Some of the townspeople think Paris Trout a hero for what he did: others that the law should make him pay.

‘A grim and fascinating novel filled with wonderfully comic touches, by a writer whose brilliant understanding of the Deep South has allowed him to capture much of its essence – its bitter class distinctions, its violence, its strangeness... A fine and engrossing work’
WILLIAM STYRON

‘Reaches out and grabs the reader by the throat’
KATE SAUNDERS, 'Sunday Times'

‘Written with a quiet, almost forensic calm, full of foreboding detail, subtly registered, and with few of the baroque set-pieces normally associated with ‘Southern’ literature’
BRIAN MORTON, 'The Times'

NOW A FILM STARING DENNIS HOPPER AND BARBARA HERSHEY

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