Joe Jones

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 NationJoe Jones is Anne Lamott''s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie''s Caf a restaurant from another era the sort of brokendown waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan. Jessie thin stooped and gorgeous at seventynine inherited the caf 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.