Presner the Remarkable

by Don Eron

Overview

For 13 years Presner has worked the graveyard shift at Tyson's 24-Hour News and Smoke. He is also an attorney (non-practicing), a playwright (unproduced), a weightlifter (non-Olympian), and a reader of detective novels (not literature). Presner is grieving for his sister, Sara, an actress, who died twelve years ago. Presner has written a play, Tales of Presner the Remarkable, which is really about his late, disgraced pal from law school, Norm Fitzhugh, a charismatic scammer who helped him when Sara was dying. 

 

Mostly, Presner has viewed life as a Chekhovian comedy, wherein characters take themselves more tragically than circumstances warrant. He draws upon art, drama, philosophy, and Jewish folklore to ease his angst. And then one day he walks into a Continuing Ed acting class and meets Lisa Caner, the greatest local actress since Sara. 

Presner the Remarkable is about the stories we tell ourselves after life spins out of control. It is a tragicomedy about one man's quarrel with fate. It is a story about starting over, this time for good.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940179275176
Publisher:	Contingency Street Press
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Sold by:	Draft2Digital
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Don Eron lives in Boulder, Colorado. And Go to Innisfree is his firsst published book.

Editorial Reviews

"Presner is the misfit in his middle-aged group of law school friends. While the others have carved out relationships and legal careers, Presner is an aspiring playwright working at a newsstand while nurturing a platonic (maybe more?) friendship with a struggling actress. . . . Eron, through Presner, elevates the novel with candor, humor, and self-awareness. From page one, the author's writing is infused with a chummy nostalgia, and the characters and social dynamics breathe with verisimilitude. Presner's wounds are deep and real, his neuroses relatable, and he simply feels worth rooting for. . . . The reader's patience is amply rewarded by Eron's talent as the story evolves and he deftly weaves together memories with subtlety and grace."-Blueink Review

"This erudite and bittersweet not-quite comedy from Eron (And Go to Innisfree) takes readers through the life and travails of the pensive Presner, a playwright and one-time attorney who has spent 13 years working nights at Tyson's 24-Hour News and Smoke, as he navigates his various relationships and the memories of his late sister, Sara, an actress. Presner is working on a play about a man who drudges through a job but afterwards shores up "the very foundations of the world with his cryptic wit and wisdom." Eron reveals that just a couple pages in, but the idea powers the novel as a whole. . . . The narrative delves deep into the themes of grief, self-discovery, and the power of storytelling to heal the soul. . . . Eron's prose, for all its richness of reference, is at its best direct and candid, expressing much in a minimum of words, depicting human resilience and selfhood while never going sentimental."-BookLife

"Death plays a prominent role in Presner's life, as it does in the Anton Chekhov plays he emulates. Because of this, he's developed stoicism, solitude, and compassion. He's a self-proclaimed underdog. . . . He's the butt of his own jokes. . . . He's a show-off in conversations with others. . . . He becomes remarkable."-Foreword Clarion (four stars)

"Presner is like a latter-day Bellow or Roth protagonist, navigating evergreen crises of aging and failure; Eron updates this tradition with Gen X concerns about art and authenticity."-Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2023-09-18
In Eron’s debut novel, a failed lawyer takes stock of his life in the weeks leading up to the wedding of a rival.

Presner’s life since law school has not been what he hoped it would be. He’s spent the last 13 years working the graveyard shift selling magazines and cigarettes at a 24-hour newsstand and chipping away at his long-unfinished play. His friends from law school have gone on to high-powered careers, including his nemesis, Gary Marx, who has become a prominent ambulance chaser. Presner has never really forgiven Marx for stealing his girlfriend during law school (or for the cheesy commercials—“Gary got me $20,000”—that have run on television for the last few years). When another old friend stops by the store to let Presner know that Marx is engaged, Presner can’t feel happy for him—even if he plans, like the rest of the old crowd, to attend the wedding. Presner hopes it will provide an opportunity to jump-start his life: He’ll ask his longtime crush, Lisa Caner, to be his date, and he’ll finish his play so he’ll have something to brag to everyone about. But the reunion does not turn out to be the triumph that Presner hopes for. The keystone member of the group—the reason they are a group at all—has always been Norman Fitzhugh. Ever since Fitz helped Presner’s sister, both legally and emotionally, during her battle with cancer 12 years earlier, Presner has considered the man his closest friend. But when it becomes apparent that Fitz has been mismanaging his friends’ money, Presner must figure out how to help vindicate the man—a job that will take all the tricks Presner learned in law school and all the empathy he’s learned as a playwright.

Eron’s prose captures Presner’s analytical, neurotic view of the world, with sentences folding in on themselves to accommodate stray thoughts and observations. Here he describes Presner’s unwillingness to show his play to his perennial crush, Lisa: “Since he’d met her, it was understood that she’d read his play when ready, when abandoned, to quote da Vinci (art’s never finished, but abandoned); even during their yearlong hiatus he had Caner in mind for this capacity—but now that he was sending it out Presner found himself demurring.” The novel unfolds slowly, with every incident filtered through its slacker protagonist’s self-deprecating, emotionally numbed commentary. Presner is like a latter-day Bellow or Roth protagonist, navigating evergreen crises of aging and failure; Eron updates this tradition with Gen X concerns about art and authenticity. The playwriting material feels slightly contrived (Chekhov comes up a lot, and the book is divided into five acts), but the legal material is quite inspired: In his relationship with the charming but untrustworthy Fitz, Presner is able to pick at the graces and flaws of the legal profession. The book may read like it was published in the 1990s, but plenty of it remains relatable to millennials entering midlife.

A throwback literary novel about the anxiety of art and aging.

Kirkus Reviews