The Catastrophist [Paperback]

Meet Daniel Wellington: art historian, academic star, devoted husband, and total basket case. Although Daniel has known nothing but success, hes convinced the future promises nothing but disaster. When his wife, known simply as R., presents him with a tiny, size-XXS Yale sweatshirt, Daniel is seized by the impulse to bolt; the specter of imminent fatherhood sends him into a full-blown existential crisis. Soon this well-intentioned young professor finds himself plotting bigamy, lying about his past, imagining his pregnant wife in the arms of an androgynous grad student, and explaining to the dean his obscene e-mail to the lead in a student production of Miss Julie.

From an idyllic New England campus to the rarefied art worlds of Berlin and London, The Catastrophist charts the rise and fall and partial rebound of an ambivalent but endearing Everyman and heralds the appearance of a major new comedic voice in American fiction.


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PRAISE FOR THE CATASTROPHIST

That we enjoy the company of this walking disaster is a tribute to Douglass witty prose; that we love R.practical, attentive, and shrewdcan be chalked up to the authors bedrock understanding of what constitutes an appealing human being. A-. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Deploying wit and humor and an acute, darker insight, Lawrence Douglas leads us through Freudian fields with an antihero we cant help but fall for immoderately. THE BOSTON GLOBE

One
The Amtrak from Montreal to New York thunders by at three thirty every morning, the only train that still runs on these once-busy tracks. The couple across the hall has grown accustomed to the noise, though their child has not. When the train rumbles off, the girls muffled sobs and the mothers calming voice filter through my thin walls. In my case, its not the train that wakes me, but the anticipation. Come 3:27, Im up, charged. Unfortunately, my biological clock is more accurate than Amtraks timetabll³*