The Salt Point - (Stonewall Inn Editions (Paperback)) by Paul Russell (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

From the award-winning author of The Coming Storm comes the brilliantly conceived and precisely rendered novel The Salt Point, a compelling novel of four people and their intermingled and unwinding desires.

Anatole loves Leigh ("Our Boy of the Mall"), a great adolescent beauty. Leigh is sleeping with Lydia, Anatole's best friend, who's fighting turning thirty. Chris, once the stunning object of Anatole's desire, is an unscrupulous friend to all and known to none.

Set in a Poughkeepsie mall--the Main Street to a new generation--The Salt Point follows Anatole, Leigh, Chris, and Lydia as they achieve their oddly triumphant lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. As promises are diminished and futures are abandoned, all four hurtle toward that place in which the nature of things is transmuted: a place not unlike the salt point, that unfixed location in the Hudson River where fresh water turns salty.

Review Quotes

"Mr. Russell has created a wise, tender, and remarkably engrossing story about human affections--their power and illogic, their preciousness and unpredictability--and about how those affections flare and fare at the 'salt point.'" --Bruce Bawer, The Wall Street Journal

"The Salt Point finds the sacred and poetic even in the slag heap of small-town America." --Edmund White

"Like one of the nastier Henry James novels, The Salt Point shows how very possible it is for all of its characters to do unspeakable harm to each other, without allowing themselves to know what they are doing." --Madison Smartt Bell, The Village Voice

"Russell moves his characters into various striking arrangements with one another as deftly as a chess master and writes about their longings with cool, evocative precision." --The Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Paul Russell is the author of three previous novels--The Salt Point, Boys of Life, and Sea of Tranquillity--as well as The Gay 100, a work of non-fiction. He is Professor of English at Vassar College and lives in upstate New York.