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The Lost Son
Returning home twelve years after abandoning her son and lover, Ellen sets off an emotional torrent of family conflict during which all three express their feelings of outrage, abandonment, rejection, pain, and vulnerability. Tour.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 1995
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23 people want to read
About the author
Brent Spencer
7 books6 followersI’m an award-winning fiction writer whose work has been published in Best American Mysteries, The Atlantic, GQ, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. I’m the author of the novel The Lost Son, the story collection Are We Not Men?, and the memoir Rattlesnake Daddy. My most recent book is The Last of Her, a crime thriller. I teach creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska and live in Ponca Hills, Nebraska with my wife, novelist Jonis Agee.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 5, 2021
Excellent.
October 13, 2014
What a solid writer Brent Spencer is. His language is fresh, visual, and unexpected, but never forced. It's sometimes startling enough to provoke a guilty laugh: "..one woman's face pale as concrete, the other's so red it was as if she'd just been slapped for twenty minutes straight."
His world of eastern Pennsylvania is solid and convincing, grounded enough to feel the moisture in the air. His details provide supreme authenticity--he knows this world--without ever being confusing or extraneous. His trio of lost souls--hapless Lloyd, searching Ellen and youngster Nick--are in the end not so much lost as on the lookout, even if they are not sure for what.
Spencer builds a sense that something might explode, someone may get themselves killed, or the many accidents-waiting-to-happen may burst upon these three or their well-drawn supporting players. "Such is life in Scaryville." But Spencer doesn't go for the easy melodrama. Instead we get real people--riding the bus home, looking for each other (literally), or counting to a million, trying to create meaning while flirting with OCD.
Nick, Ellen and Lloyd lurch from one irretrievable miscommunication to another, with no real signs of hope for better things to come, and yet, having been given a look into their hearts, it's hard not to feel optimistic as it all comes together at the end.
His world of eastern Pennsylvania is solid and convincing, grounded enough to feel the moisture in the air. His details provide supreme authenticity--he knows this world--without ever being confusing or extraneous. His trio of lost souls--hapless Lloyd, searching Ellen and youngster Nick--are in the end not so much lost as on the lookout, even if they are not sure for what.
Spencer builds a sense that something might explode, someone may get themselves killed, or the many accidents-waiting-to-happen may burst upon these three or their well-drawn supporting players. "Such is life in Scaryville." But Spencer doesn't go for the easy melodrama. Instead we get real people--riding the bus home, looking for each other (literally), or counting to a million, trying to create meaning while flirting with OCD.
Nick, Ellen and Lloyd lurch from one irretrievable miscommunication to another, with no real signs of hope for better things to come, and yet, having been given a look into their hearts, it's hard not to feel optimistic as it all comes together at the end.
April 28, 2009
Spencer crafts marvelous characters. They're so complex, each comprising this unique history of emotional damage. Each character's damage is linked and bound up with the damage of the other characters. They're all connected, for good and ill. Each needs things from the others that they, in their own cracked worlds, cannot provide. It makes for a compelling and touching novel.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews