What We Lost: Based on a True Story [Hardcover]

Accomplished novelist Peck's account of his father's horrific 1950s Long Island childhood is reminiscent of Angela's Ashes both in scope and tone. This stateside reincarnation of a world dominated by an abusive alcoholic father may not leave readers laughing, but it certainly provides a similar lens on a boy's resilience and optimism. The story unfolds as Dale Peck Sr., at age 14, is rooted out of bed by his good-for-nothing father and unceremoniously dumped at an upstate New York dairy farm owned by his kind but unfamiliar Uncle Wallace. Peck Jr. (Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; The Law of Enclosures), writes a description of the journey from one world to another that is so evocative, it's easy to forget he wasn't actually the boy in the passenger's seat. About the frozen banks of a river they drive along, he writes, "The glacial shelves look like teeth to the boy, cartoon teeth breaking apart after biting on a rock hidden in blueberry pie, and the boy laughs quietly to himself when he imagines the river being fitted for dentures like the old man. A trip to the country, he reminds himself, attempting to relax again. A weekend adventure." This weekend adventure unfolds into months, then years, until finally Peck Sr.'s mother disrupts her son's haven by demanding his return to the misery of their overcrowded, impoverished household. The boy is torn, but ends up abandoning the warm web Wallace and his stoic wife, Bessie, have spun around him. He is quickly subsumed by the depressing life he narrowly escaped, and Peck subtly demonstrates how this determined boy will not just endure life, but embrace it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Peck's account of his father Dale's horrific upbringing stuns the reader with its juxtaposition of hope, sadness, and loss. In 1956, Dale lives with seven siblings in a small house on Long Island. Their father, Lloyd (the author's grandfather), comes home drunk most nights; their mother regularly beats Dale, her least favorite, with a garden hose. In an attempt to extricate Dale from this dead-end existence, Lloyd "kidnaps" his son and drives him to the Catskills, where Loyd's brother runs a dairy farm. For almost a year, Dale learns how to milk the cows and mend fences; more important, he is enveloped in his aunt and uncle's stable routine and learns for the first time about familial love and respect. He misses his siblings, of course, and when his mother arrives with the others in tow, demanding his return, Dale is faced with a cruel decision. The author, whose novels have been highly praised for their unforgettable prose, again enriches the reader with luminous language, shining like pearls in the midst of his father's wrenching tale. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Accomplished novelist Peck's account of his father's horrific 1950s Long Island childhood is reminiscent of Angela's Ashes." (Publishers Weekly )

In the haunting new book by the acclaimed author of Now It's Time to Say Goodbye, a young man must choose between his troubled family and the new home he loves. Dale Peck, Sr., grew up poor in rural Long Island in the 1950s, sharing a one-room house with seven brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and an alcoholic father haunted by his past. When, at fourteen, Dale is more or less kidnapped by his father and taken to his uncle's farm in upstate New York, the change wrought by the move is remarkable. Thriving on the farm, Dale develops a loving relationship with his uncle Wallace, and for the first time he knows contentment. But when Dale's mother demands that he return, he is forced to choose between his broken family and the land and uncle he has come to love. It is a decision that will determine his future and the legacy he will pass on to his own son. What We Lost is a coming-of-age story that startles in its immediacy and lack of sentimentality. Refracting his father's past through the prism of his own vivid imagination, the author Dale Peck forges a bridge between generations and reveals the dark secrets at the heart of family.

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Peck started writing fiction as a freshman at Drew, but really blossomed as a writer in his junior and senior years. He worked closely with several professors in the Drew English department to hone a writing style that would earn him the department's highest honor for his unpublished first novel, All the World, which was his senior honors thesis. All three of Peck's published novels reflect his love of stories and story-telling. Martin and John recounts a gay man's coming of age; The Law of Enclosures, recently made into a movie, shifts the focus to John's parents; and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye places characters from the first two novels on a larger stage, prompting the Los Angeles Times to write that Peck is "one of the few avant-garde writers of any age who is changing the rules for prose fiction." Peck also teaches writing, and does book reviews for publications such as the Village Voice Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review.

1 The old man has an odor like a force field. He wakes the boy before dawn. Quiet, he says, and underneath his black coat his kitchen whites reek of cabbage, stewed meat, spoiled milk. We dont want to get your mother up. The old mans clothes stink of institutional food but it is his breath, wet and sickly sweet, that leaves a weight on the boys cheek like his sisters hairspray when they shoo him from the bathroom. Reluctantly he edges out of bed. Like the old man, he wears his work clothes, jeans, undershirt, brown corduroy jacket-everything but shoes. He shivers in his socks and watches in the half light as the pillowcase is stripped from his pillow and filled with clothes from the dresser, trying to warm his thin chest with thin arms and the thinner sleeves of his jacket. Thats Jimmys shirt. The old man claps him in the stomach with a pair of boots. You shut up and put these on. The boots are cold and damp and pinch the boys feet as he squeezes into them, and as he knots the laces he watches Lances drawers and Jimmys football jersey disappear into the pillowcase. But Dad. Sshh! The old man stuffs a pair of jeans into the sack. But Dad. Those are Dukes. The old man looks at the shock of blond hair on the far side of the bed, and when he turns to the boy the empty bottles in his pockets rattle and the boy can smell what was in them too. You wont have to worry about that bastard no more, the old man says, breath lighting up the air like sparked acetylene. Not where youre going. If any of the boys has awakened he gives no sign. Already Lance is hugging the extra inches of blanket where the boy had lain, and Jimmy, slotted into the crease between the pushed-together mattresses, seems folded along his spine like a blade of grass. At the far end of the bed Duke lies with his back to his dark-haired brothers, the stiff collar of his houndstooth coat sticking out beyond the blanket. A few inches beyond Dukes nose the rope-hung sheet dividing the boys bed from their sisters puckers in a draft, but Duke never goes to sleep without making sure the holes on the girls half of the curtain are covered by solid patches on the boys, and so the boy can catch no glimpse of Lois or Edi or Joanie as he is surfed out of the room by the old mans frozen spittle. All he glimpses in the gap between curtain and floor is a banana peel and two apple cores, and his stomach rumbles and he wants to check his jacket to see if his siblings have left him any food. But the old man is nudging him, Faster, faster, and the boy has to use both hands to descend the ladders steep rungs. Down below, the quilts fencing off his parents bed are drawn tight as tent flaps, and although his mothers snores vibrate through tattered layers of cotton batting both she and the baby, Gregory, tucked in his crib beside her, remain invisible. The boy pauses at the stovepipe and its single coal of heat in the hopes of warming his stiff boots, but the old man step