Product Description

THE FUNNIEST NOVEL OF THE ELECTION YEAR. William Elliott Hazelgrove’s Rocket Man is in the tradition of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Richard Ford’s Independence Day and Tom Poratta‘s Election; all three writers coming to grips with contemporary life in the suburbs. Rocket Man is a satire of life today. Dale Hammer is trying to get his piece of the American Dream, but he just can’t keep up. In one week, Dale is accused of cutting down the sign to his subdivision, plagued with a father who comes to live over his garage and on the hook for being the Rocket Man of his son’s Scout troop. In a time when the American Dream has become nothing short of being rich and famous, Dale heads for the catastrophe of Rocket Day with one mission—to give his son a sense of independence, and in the process, find himself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #641285 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-29
• Released on: 2008-09-29
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 378 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780615213071
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
This book's artist hero, writer Dale Hammer, does battle with the benighted conformity of bourgeois suburban culture. Saddled with a house and life he can't afford, Dale has alienated his wife and family through trying to have his cake and eat it, too. Dale, in a word, is unhappy. His talent has been slowly suffocating. He can no longer write his three novels far behind him, the product of a different life. He is reduced to brokering mortgages for a living, but even this ignominious day job is slowly evaporating with the housing market's decline. Dale's incisive narration of his rebellion against his stagnating life is the constant engine that drives this story. As his life crumbles around him, all seems lost for Dale, but he is inspired to an ultimate act of defiance that redeems him. The descriptions of this writer's life are funny and meaningful. However, the tidy ending after so much domestic chaos may be a bit unbelievable. This critically insightful diatribe against conformity is recommended for larger libraries. --Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA

About the Author
William Elliott Hazelgrove is the author of three previous novels: Ripples, Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. His first novel, Ripples was chosen for Editors Choice by the American Library Association. Tobacco Sticks received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and chosen as one of the best novels of the nineties (Doris Lesher Best Novels of the Nineties.) Tobacco Sticks was optioned by Televest and chosen as A Book of the Month Club Selection. William Hazelgrove has been the subject of features in People, The New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, All Things Considered, Publishers Weekly and USA Today.

Customer Reviews

Hazelgrove holds a mirror to us, and the reflection isn't all that pretty!
William Elliott Hazelgrove's ROCKET MAN is a brilliant piece of writing, a work that meticulously dissects contemporary life in America with such a keen eye that the author is able to catch at least passing glances at us all. Hazelgrove is a facile, witty, enormously gifted wordsmith, a writer able to find the extraordinary in even the most mundane, ordinary people and places and build a story that, while following a large cast of disparate characters and branches of storylines, manages to pull all the pieces together into one all-encompassing view of a single man and his life changes. This novel of life in the suburbs rings true on every page, takes no prisoners, and yet for this reader fails to encourage us to identify with the goodness in anyone!

Dale Hammer is a writer of successful books - ten dry years ago! His struggle to restore his place in the literary world is fraught with a move into a larger house in the suburbs, a move he cannot afford, and to cope with his lawyer wife who makes taking care of household chores and raising children seem like insurmountable tasks. Little things happen: he is accused by irate neighbors of cutting down the tacky sign that marks his sterile subdivision, his errant father moves in with him (broke and between many wives, still under the impression that he is the catch of the year), and must deal with a community that dumps the role of Rocket Man (organizer for the Scout troop annual show) in his unwilling lap. His income, during this lapse/block in creative writing, comes from a tacky apartment building he owns in which dwell problem renters. His family descends on him and he must cope with the circus that results. Dale bumps headfirst into his life and the conditions that make it almost inoperable and in the process he finds himself and puts at least a temporary turnabout on continuing the marks of influence from his own father that threaten to alter the future of his own son. It is OK to step outside the box of the American Dream!

Reading ROCKET MAN is entertaining, full of chuckles, and flows with beautifully constructed prose from page one to the end. Probably the joke is on us: how can we enjoy a novel that paints such a dreary picture of where we have come in our current society? But it is difficult to care about any of these odd folks. Maybe what we see is really a mirror...Grady Harp, October 08

Rocket Man is me and you
Rocket Man resonated with me and I think will do so with a wide audience. Some of the hilarious scenes and ancillary characters are necessarily hyberbolic but the main characters are real. Their relationships and trials happen to good people all over, no matter your location or persuasion. Resolution can be found and Rocket Man touches down in the right place.

Thoreau was right...
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation...and in ROCKET MAN Hazelgrove manages to capture the transcendent, heart-wrenching and soul-rending quality of a man leading just this kind of life, a life that will be familiar to many entering or moving through mid-life (I count myself among them).

Great writers write what they know, and the life of Dale Hammer, ROCKET MAN's conflicted protagonist, is achingly real. It is clear to the reader that Hazelgrove has gone for broke here, placing all of his emotional cards on the table for all to see, Hammer's messy, messy life a proxy for all those who look back over the landscape of their lives and see every wrong turn, every slip of the foot, every mistake, in clear relief -- yet are unable to change their course or trajectory for knowing.

We all want and hope that occasionally we'll make the RIGHT decisions and go the RIGHT direction and say the RIGHT thing at the RIGHT time...all while being able to hold onto at least a little of the spirit and essence of what it was to be young and indestructible. And in that lies the key to what makes this book so relevant and engaging to the "mass of men" - and women -- and a potential best-seller.