How do you put language at the center of a novel? Make the protagonist a linguist, and give everyone telling names and portentous things to say. That is what David Carkeet--himself a linguist by training--does in his novels. Jeremy Cook, the successful academic linguist and hero of Carkeet's earlier
Double Negative and
The Full Catastrophe, returns in
The Error of Our Ways. Now married and unemployed, the previously cocksure Cook follows his ambitious wife, a linguist as well--though one with a teaching position--to a tiny college in St. Louis. There Cook meets Ben Hudnut, the nut magnate of St. Louis, whose own manhood is jeopardized by failure in the nut business. The novel is a clever tale of middle-aged male insecurity and the damning consequences of fate. The joy of it all resides in Carkeet's prose and the witty wordings he designs.
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