Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

by Pete Dexter

In the 1970s and 1980s, before he earned national acclaim for his award-winning novels, Pete Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, Dexter cut directly to the heart of the American character at a time of national turmoil and crucial change. With haunting urgency, his columns laid bare the violence, hypocrisy, and desperation he saw on the streets of Philadelphia and in the places he visited across the country. But he reveled, too, in the lighter side of his own life, sharing scenes with the indefatigable Mrs. Dexter, their young daughter, and a series of unforgettable creatures who strayed into their lives. No matter what caught Dexter's eye, it was illuminated by his dark, brilliant humor. Collected here for the first time are eighty-two of the best of those spellbinding, finely wrought pieces—with a new introduction by the author—assembled by Rob Fleder, editor of the bestselling Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Book . Paper Trails is searing, heart-breaking, and irresistibly funny, sometimes all at once. As Pete Hamill says in his foreword, these essays "are as good as it ever gets."

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Short Stories, Biography, Literature, Anthologies

289 pages, Hardcover

First published February 6, 2007

About the author

Pete Dexter is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel Paris Trout and five other novels: God's Pocket, Deadwood, Brotherly Love, The Paperboy, and Train. He has been a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Sacramento Bee, and has contributed to many magazines, including Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy. His screenplays include Rush and Mulholland Falls. Dexter was born in Michigan and raised in Georgia, Illinois, and eastern South Dakota. He lives on an island off the coast of Washington.

See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Dexter

Reviews

[Powells.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

So you've got someone on your list who loves a great story, maybe reads the newspaper or magazines, but who you wouldn't really call a "book person." If they're down-to-earth and can stomach some gritty realism (column 21, page 70), and they appreciate a wry sense of humor (column 6, page 19), then Paper Trails is the perfect gift. I've reread many of the stories in this collection several times: over my morning coffee, before I go to sleep, out loud to my brother over the phone. The only thing better than reading Pete Dexter's columns is sharing them with someone else.
Recommended by Liz, Powells.com

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

finished this one tonight, 24 may 17. 4 stars. i really liked it. short pieces. apparently they all, or most, appeared in newspapers and some other titles. quite a menagerie of tales. worth a read.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you haven't read any Pete Dexter novels, you should; he's a fantastic novelist. I got my start with "Deadwood," which is a sort-of Western that displays all of Dexter's skills for setting, dialogue, and characterization. But in reading "Paper Trails," I was able to see how Dexter developed his chops as a novelist. Dexter started as a newspaperman, but I'm not sure he was ever a reporter. "Paper Trails" consists of 45 or so columns written on a range of subjects. It seems that Dexter was given free rein to write on any topic he wanted. I think the book's subtitle, noting "violence" and "forbidden desires" was a bid to sell more copies, because there are as many columns about Dexter's cat as there are about true crime. For Dexter, the fixed length of the column was like an art form, as difficult in its limits as a poem or short-short story, and the author excelled at it. I believe he embraced its challenges, seeing if he could develop characters in that brief space. Most often he was the main character, but there were also plenty of witnesses, housewives, gas station attendants, and bar denizens that made appearances. As a character, Dexter is as charmingly hapless as any other. He doesn't hold himself up as an expert on much of anything, and in fact on a few occasions makes himself look bad. In essence, he (refreshingly) does what nobody does anymore: admits he's human, admits he doesn't know all the answers, admits he's sometimes wrong. He approaches some weighty subjects like criminal justice, the death penalty, minority rights, and poverty, but with a winning sense of exploration, of trying to figure out what he thinks. I guess a newspaper column gave him that luxury. But each column is truly like a short story, and that's what kept me turning pages, often shaking my head in wonder. Dexter is a storyteller in the truest sense of the word, and like other storytellers I've encountered, I'm not sure in these columns how often the author let facts get in the way. I could be totally wrong, but I had the sense that certain events, dialogue, and characters were invented for the sake of the story. I didn't care. It's a rare author who can bring the reader to tears in the span of a few pages, yet Dexter managed to do that more than once. Some might label these "yarns," especially the ones where the author receives some comeuppance from "Mrs. Dexter," as "Southern homespun" due to the folksy dialogue, but to do so would be to ignore the craft that goes into creating them. We have the benefit of hindsight, but we can see that Dexter was chafing to break free of journalism and write fiction, where his gifts could truly shine. I, for one, am glad he did. Anytime you collect this many columns, written over a broad range of topics over a span of years, some are going to be better than others, but Dexter's voice is consistent throughout. This is not his best book--the novels are better--but if you read those and are left wanting more, "Paper Trails" is well-worth reading.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of Pete Dexter's newspaper columns or magazine pieces from the 1970s and '80s, some lighthearted, some starkly brutal, some laugh-out-loud funny. Dexter is very good at getting you to look closely at something or someone you wouldn't have thought was remarkable and maybe have an extra think about it. For me some of these columns haven't aged as well as others, but overall it is an enjoyable read.

[Hal Brodsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dexter has written some wonderful novels (Spooner is my favorite so far), but this collection of columns from the Philadelphia Daily News is perfection. Sometimes funny, often tragic I read these over and over.

[Marc T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly Recommended!

Brilliant, exquisite and insightful. This selection of columns written by Dexter when he was a journalist in the 80s and 90s is at turns heartbreaking, profound, analytical, dryly hilarious, and laugh out loud funny.
The man thinks deeply, and then has succinct and descriptive grammatical and syntactical skills to convey those thoughts beautifully. While he focuses on the everyday occurrences of the average joe and the experiences of those the average joe ignores or takes for granted, he is able to sprinkle political observations and common sense into his writings, somehow making them universal lessons for everyone.

Please read!

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed most of this book. It is a collection of articles with various subjects. Dexter's humor is dry, satirical and made me laugh at loud at times. The end of the book was more serious, and I didn't enjoy that as much. Dexter should stick with what he does best. Make us laugh, Dexter!

[louise heick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dexter at his absolute best

A short while in you come to realize what a truly gifted writer he is. Pete’s consistent ability to surprise is amazing.

[Schuyler Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pete Dexter is on of my favorite authors. His writing is tight, his insight is deep, and his humor is off the wall. “Paper Trails” puts all his talent on display.

The book is a collection of eighty-two of his well-received journalistic efforts. The essays are from newspapers and magazines that are astute enough to realize there are many readers who are tired of droning news items and who welcome some clever, diverse observations and musings. Dexter has handled that craving for decades.

Most of the entries are short. There are some towards the end of the book that tend to be wordy. I’m not sure where they came from. But, for the most part, the entries are concise and easily ingested. Most of them also contain irreverent remarks and humor that skewer conventional thinking, politics, bigwigs, and even Mrs. Dexter, his often put-upon and remarkably understanding wife. I love Mrs. Dexter.

Dexter calls the book “true stories of confusion, mindless violence, and forbidden desires, a surprising number of which are not about marriage.” There are so many of these true stories here that I hesitate to pick out my favorites. So I’ll just mention a few. There’s one where Mrs. Dexter catches Pete making love to his pillow. And another where Pete stuffs a raw egg down Mrs. Dexter’s pants to demonstrate a chicken’s egg factory process to a grandchild. There are several about inscrutable cats, insufferable editors, the never-ending search for girls, southern low-lifes, drinking adult refreshment, and juvenile pranks, most of which he instigated.

He gets a little more serious as he discusses inane lawyers, civil rights, down-on-their luck folks, and mindless violence, but his views on all these popular subjects mesh very well with mine. In fact, his entire outlook and life’s activities seem to square with my very proper mindset.

I recommend Pete Dexter’s work to every reader with a somewhat warped outlook on life. His books are also great diversions and entertaining reads. There’s no reason to be all wound tight and unfailingly opinionated. Loosen up with Dexter.

[Merciful · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? It's Pete Dexter. It's going to be good. Pete's one of those writers who hook you with the first sentence and drag you along by the eyes. You can't let go, but then again you don't want to.

A word of caution: don't make this your bedside can't-sleep-so-I'll-read-until-I-get-sleepy book. I made that mistake (yawn). His writing doesn't lull you - it engages you. It has you firing on all cylinders. You're lucky if you get any sleep at all before you finish one of his books.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that he lives not far from my current epicenter of sleep deprivation. On an even more personal level, it's also interesting (at least to me) to have discovered that he and I share the same historical migration of far northeast to deep south to far northwest.

Paper Trails is a collection of his newspaper columns from the 1970s to the 1990s, selected from his times at the Philadelphia Daily News and the Sacramento Bee. It was during this period that he began writing fiction, in no small part due to the fact that one of his engaging columns so engaged certain Philadelpians ("City of Brotherly Love" - isn't that Philadelphia's slogan?) that they went from engaged to enraged and severely beat him with baseball bats. I'm told the drunken mob numbered about 30 people.
Wow, talk about life-changing events...

At any rate, during the long convalescence that followed, he wrote two of my favorite books - Deadwood and Paris Trout. The latter won the National Book Award for Fiction and is typically compelling (if somewhat disturbing). The former, quite simply stated, is indisputably (go ahead - I dare you) a masterpiece of the "Wild West" genre, and one of my all-time favorite novels.

The dude rocks. Check him out!

[Caleb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has been on my to-read list for probably four years and in the interest of finally throwing out that sheet of paper, I'm attacking some of these oldies. Dexter is apparently an author of some renown who before that was a journalist for papers in Philadelphia and Sacramento. This is a collection of the articles he wrote for the paper, presumably as a vertical column on the left hand side of the city section. The stories are a varied lot. Some good, some not. Some very dated (these were written I think mid 1970s to early 1990s), some not. There's a lot about his wife which seem jarringly out of place compared to ones about crack's destruction of inner city Philly in the 1980s. That is perhaps one of the bigger critiques I have of the collection. The order has no real rhyme and reason and with such different tones, I would have preferred sections on different topics. That said, there were some great pieces mixed in.

[Ben Eldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newspaper column writing can be boring as hell.
Just pick up any of the glossy supplements that fall out of the weekend editions to see what I mean; middle age women going on about their kids and shoes and middle aged men going on about being middle aged.
This collection of columns from the early days of Pete Dexter's career are wonderful to read - either consecutively or one at a time, and I found them especially good for my 15 minute tea breaks at work.
Dexter does talk about his family, but in a genuinely humorous way. You end feeling a bit sorry for 'Mrs Dexter' sometimes.
All of the writing is very accessible and whether he's describing his relationship with the cat his family have adopted or random acts of horrific violence committed against decent folk, his point of view is always refreshingly dry and his wit very sharp.

[Evan Ogg Straub · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate to give this book an "OK" rating, but to be honest, it just didn't do it for me.

I found some of the articles to be interesting, only to have them drop off suddenly (of course, because they are newspaper columns). Others were just... there. For example, I thought either the first story or the last story should be thought provoking and really hit home to the reader, but neither drew me in.

Because of the format, I kept hoping for some sort of order to the book, but with no real titles to the articles, the reader is left to read the book as-written. I would have liked to follow some of the storylines contiguously, but there was no way to do that. This book would have been great as a hyperlinked document - allow the reader to follow and cross-reference the different stories.

So, I give this an "eh". Not awful, just not my style.

[Koz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel uninformed. How is it possible I hadn't heard of Dexter before? This surprises me for so many reasons. Regardless, I have him now and I'll never let go (Jack).

He is a fantastic writer. One of the reviews on the back of his book likens him to Faulkner. I've got to agree. Dexter is timeless. The book is a compilation of columns written in the 70s and 80s with some newer ones thrown in, and I worried that they wouldn't have enough relevance now. But because the writing is so good AND because Dexter is unmatched in his eye for story ideas, the book works.

Dexter's writing is funny, concise, clever and emotional without being sappy. I had one request that, if fulfilled, would've gotten him five stars: brief (even one sentence) updates on the columns about trials that were ongoing at the time.

[12vman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember reading Pete Dexter's column while growing up in Philly. In reading this book - a compilation of some of his columns for the Daily News (though I'd swear I read him in the Inquirer) and the Sacramento Bee - I was instantly transported to those days. I was eating breakfast at our old house in Springfield (Montco) , PA, with the morning paper, spotted with milk from my Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, and laughing & nodding along w/Dexter's straightforward, yet masterful words. I remembered Mrs. Dexter & her Grecian patience w/Peter. I remembered Mama, the cat that came to stay. I remembered how Pete could take a story directly from the DA's files & make it immediately and intimately human - in about 500 words. Pete Dexter is truly an American treasure. More people should read him. More people should praise him. If I believed in god, I'd ask him to bless Pete Dexter.

[Marley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a gift from someone who knew I was a journalist, and indeed it's a pretty cool thing to get when you're hoping to up your craft a little. Dexter was clearly one of the great columnists, and he has this really incredible use of the "in medias res" beginning, especially considering all but 5 of these columns never go past 2 and a half pages. In terms of the narrative applied to the factual, a lot to be learned from this guy, who can throw you into a shocking crime and an even more shocking prosecution, or get into the lives and heads of people he clearly only met on the street once randomly, or can just make you howl at one of his (though sometimes awful) comedy piece about his relationship with his wife (whoever she may be at the time).

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories do not change your perspective or open a door you had never seen before but give you a glimpse into the common and mundane in a way that is powerful. I looked at the quotes I wanted to put in

"It's always the same, " he said. Every time you're about to find something out for sure..."

"And I knew what was pulling at him; the same thing pulls at me too. The worry that things have been left unclear, that someday you will leave home and not be able to find the way back."

These stories touched me but the quotes are predictable and expected when written out of context. This is a perfect read to take you to places that you know in a familiar way but with an unusual clarity.

[Lauralee Summer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a compendium of newspaper columns that Dexter wrote over the years for various papers (I can't remember which papers he wrote for at the moment but it was a couple of major ones) before he became a novelist. The columns are short, some of them are funny, some serious, some both, and he writes excellent prose full of imagery, metaphors, puns, and little glimpses of life's hilarious and poignant moments. Some of the columns are about his marriage and his family (one is about a stray cat) and some are about life in the city/city issues. A good read for people who want to read something quick that they can put down and pick back up at will.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pete Dexter is a novelist, but he was also a newspaper columnist and essayist for several magazines; this book is a collection of his columns, mostly for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Sacramento Bee. They're short, often gut-punchingly sad, and shot through with violence; they're tales about the less fortunate, the down-on-their-luck, the bums, the hookers, and the good people to whom bad things happen. It's like Tom Waits songs in prose form. I loved it.

"I recognize the lost faces, because one of them, I think, was supposed to be mine".

[Kinga · Rating 4 out of 5]

When i first started reading this book I wasn't too impressed. It sounded like the autobiography of some journalist, but as i read on i found (thankfully) that they were short stories. All of them were interesting and ended with some sort of theme or lesson. They were so random too. Dexter's views on life, politics, and issues are actually kind of similar to mine so i enjoyed the book even more. He always had some random peice of information here and there, for example i found out there are certain states that allow the blind to hunt alone. That fact has stuck with me for awhile now.

[Vesper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pete Dexter writes about dark things. Yet, somehow, his very illumination of the human condition reminds the reader that all is not lost. Woven into his examinations of the fear and violence and darkness in our souls is, of all things, hope. Don't ask me how he does it. He doesn't point it out directly, nor shine the light of his prose upon it, but somehow, when you exit the dark rooms of his world, you look down and there it is, right in your hand: hope. How did it get there? I'll never know. But I'll keep reading Pete Dexter as long as he cotinues to write.

[Deborah Bluminberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Pete Dexter's books, Paris Trout and Deadwood, but I wasn't familiar with his work as a newspaper columnist. This is a compilation of many of his last columns, mostly about dark subjects. The writing is good, but there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for how the essays are presented. They are all over the place. And because they are newspaper columns, they are short; several seem to just drop off in the middle of a thought. This is an entertaining book. I borrowed it from the library, but this would be a good to have around for when you want a quick read.

[Madam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this book with a bias -- I'd hated the much-admired Paris Trout, so I wasn't expecting to like anything more Pete Dexter had to say. But I did. I had no idea he's so talented, attuned to the human experience, and (like me) the parent of a premature baby girl. Nor did I realize how much he credits Mrs. Dexter for his humanity. Any man who tips his hat to the good woman providing his grounding is fine by me. Well done, Mr. Dexter.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun read; taken from his columns from the Philadelphia Daily News and Sacramento Bee, and magazine contributions. For those that have read his books, especially Paris Trout, you know Dexter is tough and street-wise. From the forward by Pete Hamill, "In this marvellous collection of his journalism, novelist Pete Dexter looks at the American dragons of race, violence, drugs, booze, and hypocrisy during the 70s and 80s. His eye is exact. His ear is flawless."

[Dayna Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dexter has been a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Sacramento Bee. He has also contributed to Esquire and Sports Illustrated. This collection of some of his finest columns will make you laugh, cry, and think. A stunning collection of Dexter's work that will charm even the most jaded reader. A great way to encourage interest in non-fiction and editorial writing. A Reader's Corner Highly Recommended Read.

[elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dexter gave one of the best readings I have ever seen for this book, and the clerks told me that, despite their low status on the totem poll, he'd given them each a signed copy. A class act.
While some of the columns are a little coy, most speak of and to a humanity that is violent, hilarious, sly, and very, very familiar.

[Mackenzie Roebuck-walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

great quick read- dexter can be dark but his quick whit keeps the pages turning! Plus he is a friend of mother and dad's and used to write in Nelly's
books inscription to me:For MacKenzie, Hoping you got your mother's looks + your mother's brains + your father's ...well, hope you have his good luck when you go looking for somebody to marry. Best Wishes PD

[Jodie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting collection of Pete Dexter's columns that provide an insight into his audience and him. I laughed out loud a couple of times and found myself quite entertained. Having read much of his fiction, I was intrigued to read his nonfiction. I enjoy his writing, whatever the type, very much.

[Leanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of Dexter's collected essays from writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The are excellently funny, charming, and heartbreaking. Highly recommended. Proof to me that NPR book recommendations are always excellent.

[Tera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't say if the L.A. Times pegged Pete Dexter correctly as "The Faulkner of our time." However, this compilation of Dexter's often self-effacing columns, taken mostly from the Philadelphia Daily News, is a quick and worthy read.