Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #215415 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

The Sunday Times (Culture)
"Murr's lyrical prose brings dusty, small-town America and its
characters to life with wonderful clarity, while the narrative skilfully
celebrates the innocence and pleasures of youth alongside the dark of human
nature"

Laurence Wareing, The Glasgow Herald, 25 March 2006
Murr reveals a small-town legacy of brutality, passion and vulnerability that lingers in the mind like an obsession

Synopsis
"The Perfect Man" explores the power - both destructive and liberating - of what is not told, of the secrets that can shape us more profoundly than everything we believe to be true. Rajiv Travers, the child of an Indian mother and English father, is abandoned first to relatives in London and later to the care of his uncle's mistress, Ruth Winters, who lives in a small American town. Beginning with Ruth, a remote figure who writes romance novels filled with perfect men, this town turns out to be as exotic and strange to Rajiv as he is to its inhabitants. But Rajiv, though always an outsider, finds love when he is befriended by four of the town's children. As the children grow older, their friendship becomes increasingly intense, and is complicated not only by desire and shifting loyalties, but also by the personal failings - and secrets - of the adults around them. One secret in particular is masked by silence: the mystery surrounding the death, years before Rajiv's arrival, of an autistic child. When the silence breaks, the violence, anger, and madness that erupts costs one of Rajiv's friends the chance for any real future.

As Rajiv tries to establish his place in a town besieged by what cannot be spoken, some of the people he encounters fail utterly in their humanity, bringing about horrific consequences. Others, like Ruth - and Rajiv himself - though hardly perfect, at least struggle to understand and accept not only what love gives, but what it exacts.

Customer Reviews

"Two ways to tie yourself to a place: fall in love or commit a crime, assimilate or violate."
(4.5 stars) Rajiv Travers, the son of Gerard Travers and an Indian woman whom Gerard claims to have bought for twenty pounds, finds himself "orphaned" and uprooted at the age of five, when he is sent from India to London to live with his father, a man he does not know. By the age of twelve he has been abandoned several more times, both physically and emotionally, and has been sent to Pisgah, Missouri, to live with Ruth Winters, the romance-writing mistress of one of his uncles. A "black" child living in a white world, Rajiv becomes close friends with Annie and Lew, who often include Alvin and Nora in their activities. Each child, suffering from some personal trauma, is trying to make sense of the past and the often tumultuous and threatening present.

Pisgah, Missouri, provides a Southern Gothic setting in which author Naeem Murr explores the essence of selfhood. The sense of isolation, the difficulties (or, sometimes, impossibilities) of communication, the role of sex, and issues of power and control, perennial problems for the teenagers, are also problems for the adults in Pisgah as well. Everyone has secrets, some of them secrets which are guaranteed to be kept because they include evil activities in which an entire group has participated.

Murr, who has previously focused on dark psychological aberrations in his novel The Boy, creates a cauldron of activity here in which the adolescents try to survive the perils they face on a daily basis. The characters, while darker and, in many cases, more damaged than what we usually call "normal," come to life as their individual backgrounds and the backgrounds of their families are revealed. Rajiv, the main character, has no past in Pisgah, and his reactions to what he is seeing, hearing, feeling, and guessing guide the reader to an understanding of Murr's themes.

As the narrative switches back and forth in time, horrors unfold and mysteries get solved. Pisgah reveals itself to be a microcosm of life's trials, almost on a par with Dante's nine circles of hell. Filled with mystery and the traumas of adolescence, the book has a broader focus than a mere coming-of-age. In a sense all of humanity is on trial in Pisgah. Remarkably, some of the teenagers manage to put their lives in order and triumph, despite having faced seemingly insuperable odds, and the book is ultimately a celebration of the human spirit. Mary Whipple

The Perfect Book
I've just finished this novel, Murr's third published work which was longlisted for The Booker this year, and am amazed that I have heard relatively little about this author. This is definitely one of my top twenty books of the year and to my mind as good as the best of the 2006 shortlist.

The story follows the life of Raj, a boy born in the early 1940s, who has an Indian mother and an English father. Raj is deposited by his emotionally useless father first with his paternal uncle's family in England, and later entrusted to the care of the girlfriend of another paternal uncle in a small town in the USA. Much of the novel is taken up with Raj's childhood and friendships, and this part is an engrossing and delightful account of growing up in that era, written with perception and sensitivity. It sweeps the reader up into the achingly real milestones of life and holds them transfixed through the gamut of passions, tragedies and achievements that define any childhood. Raj has to deal with the petty prejudices of some of the small minded residents around him, but the story never becomes bogged down by the issue of race, and Raj is as unchippy and charming a child as you could hope to read about.

The evocation of small town life in the 1950s is saved from becoming cloyingly sweet by the undercurrents of sinister occurrences that are present in tandem with the easy community and unlocked doors in any parochial setting. A group of redneck residents swagger with macho bravado in the background. An unexplained murder years before Raj's arrival remains unsolved. Ostensibly chirpy nuclear families have their own troubles and secrets. As with life, the strong survive while some of the vulnerable crack.

Murr is a versatile writer; he can bring characters to life with a few choice words and can also conjure up the paradoxical feelings that can coexist in people: his characters are complex and sometimes inexplicable, the echos of their past experiences partly explaining their idiosyncrasies, just as in real life.

I give this book an unequivocal and would say that anyone who loved Black Swan Green by David Mitchell or The Little Friend by Donna Tartt will be blown away by The Perfect Man.
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The Perfect Book
This is Murr's best book yet: an array of characters set in a realistic, yet, sometimes, surreal setting. The plot is subtle, but has enough tension to make you read on. And , it is well worth it - the final denouement helps it all make sense. While the number of characters makes it occasionally challenging to follow, they are all well-drawn, creating empathy, if not sympathy, for many of them.
Murr's prose is poetic while his literary and cultural allusions are cleverly weaved into the text.
Although this book retains some of the darkness of Murr's earlier novels, it is somehow softer and more vibrant. A great read - get it!