Joe the Engineer

by Chuck Wachtel

Joe once dreamed of being an engineer, but at 27, he is a Vietnam vet, husband, meter reader, and resident of the same Queens neighborhood in which he was born and raised. Caught between the absurdity of life and his need to be significant, Joe strives for salvation from a life of futility. A critically acclaimed novel of working-class life, available for the first time in paperback.

Genres: Novels

216 pages

First published September 1, 1985

Reviews

[Pris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this novel for the way it tries to describe the inner lives of quite inarticulate people by paying attention to their perceptual field and to the cultural detritus that surrounds and offers to define them. There's little in the way of plot, just a slow, painful marital break-up, and not much in the way of deprivations. This is a suburban working-class novel, set in Queens, New York. Wachtel is brilliant at describing how people watch TV. Joe Flushing Avenue is a great character.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

blue collar fiction, my kind of book..
however just come across this in my 1987 notebook: quite good - broken marriage, blank future. Sordid, tough, raw and powerful. Sex is trousers round the knees stuff - off quick, buttoning up, down the street back home to his wife.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sneakily interesting story of a working-class Vietnam vet in Queens, written in an incredibly sparse Carver-esque way.