Balladeer of the city's broken and forgotten men, Joseph G. Peterson
looks for inspiration in urban side streets and alleys, where crooked
schemes are hatched, where lives end violently, and where pretty much
everyone is up to no good. Depicting the lives of people who have
woefully lost their way in the world--criminals and victims, the
unemployed and unemployable, the neglected and the indigent, the lonely
and the alone--Peterson nonetheless brings a poet's touch to his work,
which is redolent with allegory, allusion, and Nabokovian wordplay. His
last novel, Beautiful Piece, garnered praise from across the literary
spectrum. Enter Wanted: Elevator Man, his powerful and ambitious new
novel and the story of Eliot Barnes Jr., a man at the end of his
proverbial rope.
Haunted by the larger-than-life shadow of his father, a scientist who
may have helped develop the atomic bomb, twenty-nine-year-old Eliot
Barnes, Jr., is an apple that's fallen far from the tree. Saddled with a
useless degree in literature, caged in a rundown apartment he can't
afford, and embittered by his failure to live up to the future's
promise, Barnes, who dreams of a corner office--an aerie roost high
above the city, working with the higher-ups--begrudgingly accepts a job
as an elevator man in a downtown Chicago skyscraper. Thus begins a
profound but comedic meditation on failure in this life, how one comes
to terms with not achieving one's dreams, the nature and origin of such
dreams, and, fittingly, the meaning of the American dream itself.
As unflinching as Nelson Algren and as romantic as Saul Bellow,
Peterson's novel boasts wildly surreal plot twists and a lethal wit that
frequently erupts into full-on hilarity. Wanted: Elevator Man is the
perfect tale for learning to cope with diminished expectations in these
dark and desperate times.
