Joe Jones: A Novel

If love is details, so is storytelling, and Anne Lamott excels at it. Her way with analogy, metaphor, and evocative detail is subtle; her ability to shift from the specific to the general to the specific again, superb. -The Nation

Joe Jones is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Cafe, a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan. Jessie, thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine, inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat ; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson, ( I thought he just had good posture, said Jessie); Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Lamott’s rich and timeless themes are also here: love and loyalty, loss and recovery, staying on and staying together, the power of humor to heal and to bind.