Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Force of Gravity

Name: Force of Gravity
Author: Robert S. Jones
ISBN: 9780061743887

by R.S. Jones

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Overview

Paranoid yet judiciously reasonable, innocent yet calculating, strange yet strangely endearing, Emmet Barfield finds the world around him looming larger and larger the more he struggles to make his way within it. With Emmet as our guide, Force of Gravity transforms the world through a solitary consciousness until the reader's perceptions become as inverted as if seen through a modern version of Alice's looking glass.

Emmet's world is a place where shopping in a market requires the cunning of a carefully considered crime, where a bustling city street in summer appears as desolate as a forgotten wasteland, where a stray cat adopted for company becomes as menacing as one's darkest foe, and where a mother and son riding a ski lift suddenly find themselves dizzy with the threat of death. Through his eyes, the world becomes newly alive with the terrible vividness and weird beauty of an undiscovered territory.

About the Author, Robert S. Jones

R.S. Jones wrote Force of Gravity and Walking on Air, and was a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award. He was president of the New York chapter of the ACT UP AIDS Awareness Organization, and editor in chief and vice president of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

First novelist Jones is also the marketing manager at HarperCollins, so he has two major houses rooting for him (See Talk of the Trade, Mar. 1), as well as a strong blurb from no less than Iris Murdoch. He's well worth the attention. His book is the story of Emmet (no other name), a hapless creature who has never recovered from a rootless childhood and a mother who leaped to her death before his eyes. He constructs weird patterns of behavior and mountains of lies to protect himself from a world he finds inherently hostile. Novels told entirely from the point of view of people on the edge of sanity can be trying, but Jones's crisp, observant writing, his often mordantly hilarious scenes and his dead-on dialogue carry the reader on a wild, oddly compelling ride. Emmet tries to live on carrots alone, compiles endless diary entries, goes shopping (disastrously), adopts an appalling stray cat to befriend his unhappy dog, is robbed, tries to maintain contact with his elusive brother Jonathan and is finally committed, ever apologetic, to an asylum. Jones draws wonderful portraits of some maddening but profoundly human crazies, one of whom eventually escapes with Emmet. It is a tribute to the skill and sympathy with which Jones has evoked Emmet's pathetic life that the reader comes to care so deeply about his survival and recovery. An astonishing debut. (June)

Library Journal

The late Jones's 1991 novel about mental illness offers protagonist Emmet Barfield, who seems to be slowly drowning in the routine tasks of daily life as he begins quietly losing his sanity, taking the reader along for the ride.