Walter Falls edition by Steven Gillis Literature Fiction eBooks
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Walter Brimm is a financial advisor in his mid-thirties, husband to Gee, a university professor, and father to a seven-year-old daughter, Rea. His life appears nearly perfect, but this proves an illusion as slowly his world unravels; his actions and reactions to specific events cost him his job, his family, and his health. In search of redemption, Walter’s personal journey provides a gripping story of intimate longing and a fallen man’s brave attempt to reconcile all that has caused him to sabotage his happiness while answering questions seeded deep in his past.
PRAISE
“An exceptionally well-written novel . . . Walter Falls is highly recommended as a powerful and moving saga of the human condition.” —Midwest Book Review
Walter Falls edition by Steven Gillis Literature Fiction eBooks
Steven Gillis shows great promise with Walter Falls. This debut novel, as the title suggests, chronicles the descent of one Walter Brimm, by his own account a successful wheeler-dealer of finance in fictional Renton, and husband to the chilly Gee, who may or may not be cheating on him with the mysterious Tod Marcum, editor of local college litmag and all-around liberal do-gooder.It's easy to feel Walter's pain. He's the kind of guy who works hard and isn't appreciated for it--at the office, where he's a bit of a pack mule to his firm's partners, and at home, where his wife seems to have lost all use for him, aside from financing her extracurricular affairs and looking after their daughter when she's busy with more important things. (More one her later.) Walter's withering significance is manifest in his withering health, and his desperate plan to ruin his rival for Gee's heart.
Gillis's command of the language is strong--perhaps a bit too strong. Throughout Walter's first-person narrative, the author seems to go out of his way to show off his vocabulary skills, while not necessarily moving his story forward. And command over language doesn't always translate into command over dialogue. Aside from Walter's colleague, the bon vivant, Jack Gorne, I found the townspeople of Renton sounding too much the same, and rather wooden at that. Attributions notwithstanding, I wasn't sure who was doing the talking. And I was struck by how everyone said "I've" in place of "I have." "I've an important meeting to get to." "I've no idea who's talking right now." The word "otherwise" appears so often that I wondered if Gillis wasn't otherwise working a motif with it; if so, the motif does not pay off for this reviewer. "I've got to have another editorial go-round next time, otherwise..."
Despite its flaws, Walter Falls does breathe; Walter and Tod are especially well drawn characters, as is Dr. Janus Kelly, another true believer who figures later in the narrative. In fact, a sort of rushed second act concludes with Walter pretty much bottoming out, leaving this reader curious as to what might happen over the next hundred or so pages. An abrupt shift to the third person takes place at the beginning of the third act, and focuses on Kelly and his beautiful artist-paramour. Though shocking, this perspective change was a welcome one--and yet Walter's actions, now seen from more than one point of view, flummoxed me until the end. Is he trying to redeem himself for having flushed Tod's trust, and his money, down the toilet in a series of shoddy investments and double-deals? If so, why is he doing it this way? And what's the deal now with Gee?
Oh, Gee, you are the type of woman Jack Gorne and his ilk would refer to as a ____ (hint: it starts with a "c"). You make Hillary Clinton seem like a party girl. Throughout most of this narrative I pitied Walter, because he was so emasculated by the indifferece of his wife, who to anyone with eyes is either sleeping with Tod, or planning to do so very soon. Her open disrespect of her husband is symtomatic of a nation of women who need a man--or at least the ones they married--like a fish needs a bicycle. Not that Walter is any perfect husband, but women like Gee give a bad name to progressive, liberal American housewives, whether they work at home, raising their own kids, or at the local college finishing the job with other people's children.
Walter's relationship with his daughter doesn't seem very fun-filled either; he suffers more, it seems, with the strain of love from a distance, of worry over the kid's well-being. Perhaps it is this way for many fathers with daughters, though I hope not. During his prolonged, and court-mandated, time away from her, we rarely hear about the hole that would be in any parent's heart, the ache. She's a parenthetical footnote to Walter's skullduggery in act three, a wee vehicle to elicit occasional sympathy--too bad.
I'm not sure what to conclude from Walter's final actions, which, though somewhat desperate, show him certainly in charge of himself again. Yes, Walter indeed falls, even rises again. Is he redeemed? Perhaps we'll find out in the sequel.
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Walter Falls edition by Steven Gillis Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I loved Steven Gillis's novel, Walter Falls! I was immediately drawn into the characters' lives, deceptions, dilemmas and machinations, and found myself questioning my own automatic moral judgments on who is good or evil and why. I found this book hard to put down and a real "page turner." And after finishing it, I found it hard to put the questions raised out of my mind. As with other great literary characters, one wonders, "What happened next? Where is Walter, or Gee, now?"
Like a relentless force, this debut novel from Steven Gillis compels the reader to become engrossed in the machinations of Walter Brim as he unwittingly, but autonomously, causes his life to rapidly unravel around him.
Steeped in engrossing philosophical dilemmas, Gillis not only presents captivating prose that encircles Walter's ever-dissolving world but he eloquently weaves a story with such emotional force that the reader is consistently confronted with engrossing moral questions.
From consuming devotion and inexorable jealousy to culpability to salvation - - Walter questions his own being in the same fashion that readers will be forced to confront their own.
A wonderful first novel leaves readers waiting for subsequent works. Gillis is a fresh new voice that will be enthusiastically welcomed in the literary world.
Irony is the master trope of the universe, a fact which Walter Brimm must understand in the marrow of his bones by the end of his descent in "Walter Falls." Walter also has a flair for understatement, amply evidenced by the first sentence of this novel by Steven Gillis that declares, "I screw things up sometimes." Walter, a financial advisor, is married to the lovely Geni, a sociology professor. They met in front of Joan Miro's "The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Couple in Love," became lovers, and eventually agreed that a prolonged commitment was in order. But while their marriage has produced a daughter, there is a fatal lack of understanding between Walter and Gee that has tragic consequences.
The catalyst for Walter's fall is the friendship between Gee and Tod Marcum, owner and editor of the "Kerrytown Review" and clearly a kindred spirit for Walter's wife. When Gee spends more and more time with Tod, supposedly working on various projects, while singing his praises at every opportunity, Walter leaps to the obvious conclusion, with his readers right behind him. So when Gee urges Walter to provide some financial advice for Tod, we are not surprised that Walter succumbs to the devil on his shoulder and sets up a plot to ruin his nemesis. However, we are surprised to learn that on a deeper level this actually goes against Walter's grain.
The idea that this story is about Walter's "fall" involves more than just the first part of the novel in which his marriage and career implode. There is also his befuddled search for redemption that provides us with even deeper insights to Walter's true nature and some realizations that are disconcerting to him even if they are not necessarily so to us. But it is clear from early on in this novel that Walter has lost himself and the question is not so much whether or not he will find himself again, but what there is to find.
Ultimately the question is whether Walter Brimm is a man more sinned against than sinning; not that there is an easy answer to such a line of inquiry. The problematic character here is Gee, who displays the sort of passive aggressiveness towards destroying her marriage that I have often seem employed in the real world. When Walter suddenly summons up the courage to confront her on his worst fears, she basically seals the fate of all of the characters in "Walter Falls" by her response. I should mention that I detest passive aggressiveness as a style of resolving conflicts, because when we discover the flaw in Walter's reasoning I immediately jumped on the mitigating circumstances to keep my initial judgment intact. After all, I find sins of omission to be more reprehensible than sins of commission.
"Walter Falls" is categorized as, in order, Middle aged men-Fiction, Failure (Psychology)-Fiction, and Midlife crisis-Fiction, which I find an interesting trio of descriptions. But since I consider midlife crises to be, by definition, of internal origin, I find that appellation to be off base, with similar reasoning for dismissing the first. This leaves the psychological dimension of the novel, although that only becomes clear in retrospect. This is the first novel by Steven Gillis and it will certainly be interesting to see where he goes next because his second book will suggest some additional insights into this story, even if it is not his intention.
Steven Gillis shows great promise with Walter Falls. This debut novel, as the title suggests, chronicles the descent of one Walter Brimm, by his own account a successful wheeler-dealer of finance in fictional Renton, and husband to the chilly Gee, who may or may not be cheating on him with the mysterious Tod Marcum, editor of local college litmag and all-around liberal do-gooder.
It's easy to feel Walter's pain. He's the kind of guy who works hard and isn't appreciated for it--at the office, where he's a bit of a pack mule to his firm's partners, and at home, where his wife seems to have lost all use for him, aside from financing her extracurricular affairs and looking after their daughter when she's busy with more important things. (More one her later.) Walter's withering significance is manifest in his withering health, and his desperate plan to ruin his rival for Gee's heart.
Gillis's command of the language is strong--perhaps a bit too strong. Throughout Walter's first-person narrative, the author seems to go out of his way to show off his vocabulary skills, while not necessarily moving his story forward. And command over language doesn't always translate into command over dialogue. Aside from Walter's colleague, the bon vivant, Jack Gorne, I found the townspeople of Renton sounding too much the same, and rather wooden at that. Attributions notwithstanding, I wasn't sure who was doing the talking. And I was struck by how everyone said "I've" in place of "I have." "I've an important meeting to get to." "I've no idea who's talking right now." The word "otherwise" appears so often that I wondered if Gillis wasn't otherwise working a motif with it; if so, the motif does not pay off for this reviewer. "I've got to have another editorial go-round next time, otherwise..."
Despite its flaws, Walter Falls does breathe; Walter and Tod are especially well drawn characters, as is Dr. Janus Kelly, another true believer who figures later in the narrative. In fact, a sort of rushed second act concludes with Walter pretty much bottoming out, leaving this reader curious as to what might happen over the next hundred or so pages. An abrupt shift to the third person takes place at the beginning of the third act, and focuses on Kelly and his beautiful artist-paramour. Though shocking, this perspective change was a welcome one--and yet Walter's actions, now seen from more than one point of view, flummoxed me until the end. Is he trying to redeem himself for having flushed Tod's trust, and his money, down the toilet in a series of shoddy investments and double-deals? If so, why is he doing it this way? And what's the deal now with Gee?
Oh, Gee, you are the type of woman Jack Gorne and his ilk would refer to as a ____ (hint it starts with a "c"). You make Hillary Clinton seem like a party girl. Throughout most of this narrative I pitied Walter, because he was so emasculated by the indifferece of his wife, who to anyone with eyes is either sleeping with Tod, or planning to do so very soon. Her open disrespect of her husband is symtomatic of a nation of women who need a man--or at least the ones they married--like a fish needs a bicycle. Not that Walter is any perfect husband, but women like Gee give a bad name to progressive, liberal American housewives, whether they work at home, raising their own kids, or at the local college finishing the job with other people's children.
Walter's relationship with his daughter doesn't seem very fun-filled either; he suffers more, it seems, with the strain of love from a distance, of worry over the kid's well-being. Perhaps it is this way for many fathers with daughters, though I hope not. During his prolonged, and court-mandated, time away from her, we rarely hear about the hole that would be in any parent's heart, the ache. She's a parenthetical footnote to Walter's skullduggery in act three, a wee vehicle to elicit occasional sympathy--too bad.
I'm not sure what to conclude from Walter's final actions, which, though somewhat desperate, show him certainly in charge of himself again. Yes, Walter indeed falls, even rises again. Is he redeemed? Perhaps we'll find out in the sequel.
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