Synopsis
JOE JONES is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Café, "the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday.
Library Journal
Lamott has written before about copingwith death in Hard Laughter , with life in Rosie. But Joe Jones is about nothing else; coping seems to fill the hearts and minds of the characters at Jessie's Cafe, and it certainly dominates their epigrammatic, italic-studded conversation. Not that theirs isn't a lot to cope with. Louise, cook and philosophical earth mother, pines for Joe, the faithless lover she sent away, and he, a hypochondriacal drifter, longs for her. Willie, Jessie's gay grandson, loses a lover to a distant job and his grandmother to heart failure. And those are only their current trials. Lamott's spare prose can sing, but here it too often sounds forced. ``Life is hard and then you die,'' as these characters note more than once, is too trendy and insubstantial a framework for the fine work Lamott can do. Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.