Vital Parts: A Novel (Carlo Reinhart #3)
Serious and literary fiction, Humourous fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A bitterly comic novel of middle-aged angst and middle-class American life in the 1960s, by the acclaimed author of Little Big Man It is the late sixties in suburbia, and Carlo Reinhart&’s life is a mess. He&’s fat, broke, middle… aged, and unemployed. His anarchist son hates him, and his wife has taken a younger lover and thrown Carlo out of the house. In fact, the only one who doesn&’t consider him contemptible and ridiculous seems to be Carlo&’s adoring, overweight daughter, who is almost as pathetic as he is. Even his affair with a twenty-two-year-old nymphomaniac is strangely unsatisfying. Then, just as he&’s reaching his lowest point, the self-styled Ultimate Human Irrelevancy is offered a golden opportunity to grab a piece of the American Dream, thanks to the reappearance of his old school chum Bob Sweet. Bob, who has a gift for success, is inviting Reinhart to get in on the ground floor of his latest venture: cryonics. But while Carlo loves the taste of the good life that his friend has suddenly provided, he&’s not quite certain whether Sweet wants him as a partner . . . or as a human popsicle. The third novel in Thomas Berger&’s acclaimed Carlo Reinhart Series, Vital Parts is a stingingly hilarious swipe at twentieth-century culture and mores. Unrestrained and unapologetic, it is a tour de force from a master satirist that stands alongside Joseph Heller&’s Catch-22, John Kennedy Toole&’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and the novels of Kurt Vonnegut as a trenchant and funny comment on American life.