"If love is details, so is storytelling, and Anne Lamott excels at it. Her way with analogy, metaphor, and evocative detail is subtle; her ability to shift from the specific to the general to the specific again, superb."—The Nation
Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie's Café, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken–down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." 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, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson, ("I thought he just had good posture," said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott's rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.
- ISBN10 1593760035
- ISBN13 9781593760038
- Publish Date 5 August 2003 (first published 1 October 1985)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Counterpoint
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 256
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781593760038