Adam the King Hardcover - 2008

Excerpt

Adam and Maisie had the wedding of the the year that year in Clement’s Cove. And they were no longer young. He was in his fifties and never been married. She’d been married once, for about twenty minutes to a Navajo chief outside Taos and later she adopted two little Chinese girls, but mostly she had lived alone. They invited everybody as if it were once in a lifetime. Their families that hardly knew each other and probably never would, old friends, newer friends, an ecumenical crowd, those who got rich and those who didn’t, those who invented something and those who played along, government guys, research guys, investment guys, TV guys, a few artists, a couple writers, doctors and lawyers and wives, ex-hippies who started country businesses and those whose best days were thirty years behind them. The meritocracy in all its multiform display. And they invited everyone in Clement’s Cove, too. All the year-rounders, Jeffrey Lewis the people who weren’t from away. A big tent, as the politicians used to say. And it was a very big tent. They had to clear trees to fit it on the land, a tent of Camelot or the Thousand and One Nights.

Media reviews

Library Journal

“[Lewis’s] marvelous ear for idiomatic speech is revealed as much through narration as in dialog. . . . Ultimately, public libraries should have the entire quartet in their collections.”


Los Angeles Times

“Lewis catches the thrill of proximity to America’s eastern WASP aristocracy to an uncomfortable degree: their studied vagueness, their heartiness, the aloofness that cannot be copied.”


The Plain Dealer

“ . . . an insightful and even beautiful writer . . .”


Portland Press Herald

“ . . . a writer with consummate skill . . . ”