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The Train Store - Train
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List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $3.45
Your Save: $ 9.55 ( 73% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780375714092
ISBN: 037571409X
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2005-02-01
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2005-02-01
Studio: Vintage
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A bit difficult to picture this as a movie
Comment: I picked this up after seeing it listed as an upcoming neo-noir film (around 2010). I'm sure interested as to who will be cast in it.We get a brief introduction to Miller Packard before we meet the title character, a young African-American caddie in 1950's Los Angeles area, and yes, racism was rampant in that era. The two cross paths briefly before they more significantly come together later in the book. We also meet Norah, victim of a brutal attack by a couple of characters from the golf course where Train is employed and who becomes involved with Packard.While the novel portrays racism, it also comments on hypocritical liberal attitudes.Importantly, this is a raw and uncompromising tale, quite noirish in its feel The story is well told with vividly portrayed characters. It did lose me a bit around the mid-point as I wondered just exactly where it was going, but it picked up again and kept me involved until the ending which first seemed unsatisfying, but upon reflection was right. And I will be waiting hopefully for a couple of years to see how it translates to the big screen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 50's Crime Noir with a Social Conscience
Comment: 1953 and Train is a caddie at an exclusive all-white country club. He doesn't bother nobody, he doesn't get in the way, and all he wants to do is put his money in a sock in his drawer until he has enough to go out on his own. Train is Lionel Walk and he's 17 and black and just being a young black man in Southern California is enough to get you in all kinds of trouble.
Miller Packard is a detective in Los Angeles, but he doesn't act like one. A gifted golfer with a brutal disposition he's as hard-boiled as they come, associating with anyone who'll take risks and gamble money. Packard seems to be riding that fence between the legal and the illegal, ethical and crooked. But results are what matters and Packard sees the world without shades of skin color or class distinctions - he sees everything as being in three camps; that which can hurt him, that which can help him, and the rest. He deals with life pro actively.
Train is in the wrong place at the wrong time, finding himself in the middle of a murder and rape investigation that he didn't want any part of while fighting through his own personal hell at home where his mother has yet again taken up with the wrong man. Everything that can go wrong does.
Until Packard notices that Train can play the game of golf.
Then it all turns into a roller coaster ride.
A ride I enjoyed to the end. Masterfully told and perfectly timed.
- CV Rick
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Sometimes great, sometimes not"
Comment: The 4 STAR rating is because author Pete Dexter can write with the force of a sledgehammer, and although he's inconsistent, that ability is uncommon. This noirish novel, set in 50's LA, has the requisite sex, violence, and ambiguity, but its best parts dissect country club golf and all who play at it, along with capturing the decline into failure of a real estate development. These are unusual aspects to highlight in this genre, but Dexter's prose is wicked at denuding these arenas. Dexter gets to the essences of these narrow worlds as they existed in a not-so-terribly-long-ago time period. The truth is that I should only have given this book 3 STARS: Much too much of the plot is built of blocks that don't fit together; the sex/love/violence of the "relationship" between two of the main characters is unbelievable; and the conclusion is so open-ended that you are left feeling as if you ran out of gas at the side of the road before arriving at any destination. Additionally, a horrific rape and multiple murder scene that takes place in the first third of the novel is so over-the-top as to be unconvincing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Train
Comment: I have been a big fan of Pete Dexter's since first reading "The Paper Boy." Since then I have read all of his books and would say that I enjoyed "Brotherly Love" the most. I was very excited to come across "Train" recently and order the book as quick as I could. "Train" is an excellent book and Dexter stay closes to his signature style. I do however agree with some of the reviewers that the book loses momentum at the end. When I finished the the last page I fond myself whishing there were another 100 pages to go. Overall I enjoyed the book and would recommend reading any and all of Dexter's works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dexter at the Top of His Game
Comment: It's been too long since Pete Dexter wrote a cluster of great noirish novels ( The Paperboy and Brotherly Love among them) and I was floored to stumble across this brand new Dexter novel when I figured he'd packed it in. The time in between has sharpened him. Train packs a punch and Dexter, as I've come to expect, jams more into one book than most writers can in two or three. This story is wickedly funny, dark and fluid like Hammett or Chandler, and has a meaningful message about self-deception and also delivers some commentary on racism in the 1950s. Dexter is pat for creating hardnosed and realistic characters ( read Paris Trout) and nowhere will you find a typical knight-in-shining-armor, squeaky-clean hero. He avoids all of that and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. Awesome as usual. Hopefully we don't have to wait six or seven years for the next one.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname “the Mile Away Man.” Packard’s easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scared in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard’s tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship kindness is never far from cruelty.
In Train, National Book Award-winning Pete Dexter creates a startling, irresistibly readable book that crackles with suspense and the live-wire voices of its characters.
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