Ed King

August 1, 2011
Guterson (The Other) uses key elements of Oedipus the King as scaffolding for a snarky comedy skewering contemporary values. In 1962, a 34-year-old actuary seduces an underage au pair, producing a child who, abandoned, is adopted by the prosperous King family and named Edward. But Ed is not a king in name only; he grows into the "king of search," a man in the mold of Jobs or Gates running a company/kingdom akin to Google called Pythia. Guterson fans may be surprised at his lack of sympathy this time out; his characters are superficially realized and relentlessly ridiculed. The cure for the guilt Ed feels over causing a stranger's death? The right antidepressant. Ed has copious encounters with older girls, and then older women, a recurring theme Guterson employs partly for fun, but mostly to trumpet his point: Ed's not only Sophocles' Oedipus but also Freud's, thanks to an oversized (and oversimplified) Oedipus complex. But Guterson gives the myth neither new perspective nor fresh twist, and the ancient drama doesn't illuminate the present. The novel's worldview doesn't allow for heroes or gods, and treats fate as if it were mere coincidence. But the story is propelled by irony, much of it delightful, and if we're able to mock ourselves, we can't be all bad. Can we?

September 15, 2011
From Guterson (The Other, 2008, etc.), a retelling of Oedipus Rex for the information age.

In 1962 Seattle, actuary Walter Cousins hires a British exchange student as au pair to help with his children while his wife recovers from her nervous breakdown. Soon he and Diane, a 15-year-old sociopath, are sleeping together. She becomes pregnant and disappears with the baby. He spends the rest of his life sending her child support, unaware she has abandoned the infant on a doorstep in a prosperous neighborhood. A random couple finds the foundling and turns him over to an agency that arranges an adoption. Alice and Dan King never disclose to their son Ed that he is adopted while raising him in their loving reformed Jewish household. During a rebellious period in his teens, Ed gets into a highway fracas with a stranger. Ed leaves the scene of the resulting fatal accident emotionally shaken but is never caught. After a brief bout of debilitating guilt, Ed graduates high school, where an affair with his teacher gives him a predilection for older women. As a math genius in college, Ed focuses on the "nascent field of search" while his equally brilliant but geekier younger brother Simon (the Kings' biological son from an unexpected post-adoption pregnancy) becomes a success at computer gaming. Meanwhile Diane has recreated herself several times, moving up and down the socio-economic ladder, scamming and being scammed. She's 42 but looks 32 when she and Ed meet at an exhibit on probability that coincidentally she first attended with Walter. Their mutual attraction is immediate. Soon Ed's company has grown bigger than Google. But in 2017, his experiments into artificial intelligence and genome mapping lead him to unsettling discoveries about his past as well as his present. 

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011

Milquetoast actuary Walter Cousins sleeps with his underage British au pair; the babe that results is subsequently adopted and grows up to be Edward Aaron King, billionaire Internet tycoon. His life is fated to end in tragedy; this is a modern retelling of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. Snow Falling on Cedars author Guterson is getting really ambitious; with a 75,000-copy first printing and a reading group guide.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2011
How would a modern man go about killing his father and marrying his mother, just like Sophocles' Oedipus? Guterson's vivid re-creation begins with randy young father Warren, who launches his career as a serial philanderer by sleeping with Diane, his family's underage British nanny. It continues with Diane's inopportune pregnancy and callous abandonment of newborn Ed, who is quickly adopted by a nice Jewish couple. While the erstwhile innocent teen mother reinvents herself as a call girl, cocaine dealer, and trophy wife, young Ed thrives in his middle-class upbringing until a phase of teenage rebelliousness places him behind the wheel of a car that causes a fatal accident, after which he develops a predilection for older women and an uncommon acuity for algorithms and techno-logic. Getting Ed's and Diane's paths to cross at all requires a feat of Olympian proportions. How they then marry and revel in the fruits of Ed's phenomenal Internet success is a study in outsized avarice and arrogance. Exuberantly rambunctious, Guterson's bold pondering of the Greek classic is a fiendishly tantalizing romp. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A national tour and hefty first printing will support avid interest in bestselling Guterson's daring new novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2011

Walter Cousins has an institutionalized wife, two kids, and a job to hold down, but he still manages to hire, seduce, and impregnate a British nanny, Diane Burroughs, setting in motion a tale of mythic proportions. Refusing to abort, the wily Diane gives birth to a baby boy, abandons him, and proceeds to shake down Walter for a monthly check that starts her on the road to entrepreneurship. Diane's baby is adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Dan King, who, after forging a birth certificate, perch their Eddie on a pedestal so high he can't help but fall. Walter becomes a serial philanderer, Ed builds an Internet empire, and readers watch in horror as three disparate lives hurtle toward their fate in this uneven reimagining of the Oedipus myth. VERDICT While Diane's character practically jumps off the page, the titular Ed King comes across as a cardboard cutout. What commences as a sophisticated, Franzen-like look at the foibles and dashed dreams of the American family devolves into a melodrama that just doesn't feel authentic. Still, Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars; Our Lady of the Forest) has a reputation for handling hot-button topics, and his fans will likely clamor for this. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.