A review by boxfish
Jernigan by David Gates

5.0

I'm surprised a book this good (and one short-listed for a Pulitzer, apparently), isn't better-known. I stumbled across it on a "help me find the name of this book" forum where someone had remembered it only by the lines

immediately following the wife's death in the driveway:

"I walked around the end of the garage instead and back to the pool, now deserted. I climbed the steps up onto the deck, felt like I was going to black out, quick sat down on something, and when the shiny flecks stopped swimming in front of my eyes I looked down and saw her wet footprints fading."

. The whole book wound up being full of images that elegant and memorable; the narrator's voice is as perfect and unusual as I've ever read for the first-person-account-of-slide-into-degeneracy narrative. All in all, one of the most un-put-downable books I've read in a long time, and one I'm still amazed isn't firmly established as one of the greatest books of the last few decades.