The Alibi Breakfast

Eight years ago, readers were invited to accompany Maurice Locksley on his rounds, as he paid court to his wife, his ex-wife, and his mistress in dizzying succession. THE MARRIAGE HEARSE, his account of that wild winter's night, was judged "one of the funniest, smartest, and most generous novels about marriage from a male point of view." (Phyllis Rose, in The Nation)Locksley himself was "by turns so cocky, so self-deprecating, and so funny that it is impossible not to like him." (Publishers Weekly) Most surprisingly, perhaps, the book, according to The New York Times Book Review, was "above all a love story, and a rather touching one at that."Now, eight years older in THE ALIBI BREAKFAST, Locksley is still "Laugh-out-loud funny" (Bloomsbury Review) but not nearly so cocky as he contemplates the possibility that his riches are reduced to a single woman-or is it even worse than that?Certainly it is worse when he considers his work as an author, which has become unpopular and non-existent, in that order. Even his health is precarious. And his three children, so realistically drawn in the earlier volume, have grown into vivid emotional lives of their own. Locksley must now watch those lives unfold from his sickbed in the opening chapters of this bittersweet summer fable.Duberstein's prose is as rich, precise, and allusive as ever; the people in his "house" are as real as the people in your house (terrifying thought), and he weaves the varied strands of plot into a tale of rare depth and integrity.