Linger Awhile

Irving Goodman, self-confessed dirty old man, is 83 years old and has just fallen in love. Unfortunately, Justine Trimble, star of 1950s cowboy B-movies, has been dead for 47 years. He saw her first in Last Stage to El Paso, a lowlife black-and-white Western, and has been unable to think of anything else since. Desperate, Goodman invokes the help of his old friend, Istvan Fallock, to see if they can't somehow coax a videotape to yield the 25-year-old Justine. So with a test tube, distillation of frog, a soupcon of primordial soup mixed with a suspension of disbelief, they attempt to summon her back to life; to their surprise and consternation, she materializes. As a reward for lust and hubris, Irving gets a lot more than the affection and attention he'd bargained for.

Thus begins an amazing tale of murder and mayhem in contemporary London, where sexy vampire cowgirls run amok, chased by men old enough to know better. Russell Hoban is in top form with his much-anticipated latest novel. As the British Sunday Telegraph says, "I've often thought of Russell Hoban as a sentimental Samuel Beckett for people who would rather Vladimir and Estragon just did something while waiting for Godot not to show up.

From BooklistCult favorite Hoban is the author of both children's books about badgers and adult books about aging horndogs. This one's about Irving Goodman, an 83-year-old Londoner who falls in love with 25-year-old Western movie star Justine Trimble. Unfortunately, Trimble died way back in the black-and-white era. A technologically gifted friend, Istvan Fallok, uses a screen capture to bring Trimble back to life, but there's a catch: she needs continual infusions of blood to keep her healthy color. Catch two: now Fallok wants the vampire cowgirl, too. It's an amusing, intelligent read, part science fiction (the way Vonnegut wrote it), part police procedural, part farce. Despite the adult subject matter, the same qualities that inform Hoban's kids' stuff are in evidence: succinctness and a sense of the seriousness of play. There's plenty of food for thought about the arbitrariness of affection, though it's well tempered with questions like, "How fucking old does a man have to be before he stops being an adolescent?" To which Irving replies, "A dirty old man is the only kind of old man there is." Graff, Keir

ReviewAn adult fairy tale, an outrageous and genial fantasy of love, sex and death...a unique and peculiar union of the everyday and the wholly surreal.

Russell Hoban's remarkable novels have gathered a loyal following over the past 40-odd years...Linger Awhile will not disappoint... --The Sunday Times --The Independent

Russell Hoban's perfectly cadenced, slyly comic prose is ambrosia. --Washington Post Book World

Burst[s] with energy, invention, wit, observation, and just plain oddity. --The Guardian