You Don't Love This Man

January 3, 2011
At the start of DeWeese's engaging debut, Paul, a bank manager in the Pacific Northwest, loses his three-year-old daughter, Miranda, for a short time while trick-or-treating. After Miranda disappears 22 years later, on the day of her wedding, Paul begins a series of increasingly frustrating attempts to locate and talk with her. Unable to read relationship cues, Paul is often surprised or angered by the actions of those he thinks he knows well, including his now ex-wife, Sandra, and Grant, a friend who became his daughter's intended without his awareness. Paul's bank is robbed on the day of the wedding by the same man who robbed it two decades earlier, which adds to the trauma and confusion. Essentially decent, caring, and loyal, Paul is more valued than he suspects. Paul learns some valuable lessons as he retraces and re-evaluates his life in this insightful novel.

December 1, 2010

The day a man's daughter is to be married is not the best day for someone to rob the bank he manages, but such are the circumstances in this literary debut.

Paul is a bank manager in an unnamed Pacific Northwest city, and DeWeese renders him as oddly disaffected and detached. Paul is divorced, but he's comfortable with his former wife, Sandra, and her new husband, at least until their 26-year-old daughter, Miranda, decides to marry Paul's best friend and contemporary, Grant. Now Paul is in debt to pay for a wedding he doesn't want to happen. The book chronicles that fateful wedding day, which is complicated by the robbery by the same bandit who held up the bank during Paul's first days on the job. Worse, Miranda has disappeared, and Paul sets out on a confused search to find her. Using first person and flashbacks to reveal seminal events, the author dissects Paul's life, beginning with his boyhood as the only child of a distracted single mother. Readers learn of Paul's courtship; watch as he relies on Grant for social and personal guidance; and empathize as he struggles with fatherhood. Paul is distanced and yet caring, alienated and yet self-aware, living as if he cannot reach those he loves most. At 49, he has become a curious mixture of melancholic acceptance and ironic appreciation. DeWeese deftly uses dialogue to reveal character, not only for Paul but also for Grant, Miranda and Sandra. He also brings to life minor characters such as Gina, who was Paul's sexual mentor during college, then Grant's one-time lover, and finally Miranda's employer. Another likable character is Catherine, an assistant at Paul's bank, who serves as a perfect foil to reveal Paul's loneliness.

Life, both mundane and off-kilter, is revealed in this fine novel about a man who may not be as lost as he thinks.

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February 15, 2011
With deep compassion and wry humor, DeWeese examines the intricacies of fatherhood, friendship, and happenstance in his stylistically uneven first novel. Hours before Pauls daughter Miranda is to marry his best friend, Paul receives news that someone has robbed the bank he manages in a Pacific Northwest city. But Paul is more concerned that neither he nor anyone else has been able to contact Miranda all day. To make matters worse, he discovers that the robber is the same man who held him up 25 years earlier at the same bank, an incident that has given Paul the one worthwhile story of his life to tell. As Pauls day proves increasingly more complicated, he reevaluates his tumultuous past, including the coincidental bank robberies and his relationships with his daughter, ex-wife, current girlfriend, and best friend, who is soon to become his son-in-law. While Pauls narration is at times heartfelt and wise, DeWeeses prose is often clunky and distracting, leaving the otherwise admirable story feeling forced.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)