Yours, Jean

by Lee Martin

Overview

“When she refused me,” Charlie says at his trial. “Well, I had that gun. What else was I to do?”


Lawrenceville, Illinois, 1952: Jean De Belle, the new high school librarian, is eager to begin the next phase of her young life after breaking off her engagement to Charlie Camplain. She has no way of knowing that in a few short hours, Charlie will arrive at the school, intent on convincing her to take back his ring.


What happens next will reverberate through the lives of everyone who crossed paths with Charlie and Jean: the hotel clerk who called him a cab, the high school boy who became his getaway driver, and the English teacher who was Jean’s landlady, her confidant, and perhaps more.


Based on a true crime and ideal for readers of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Elizabeth Strout’s beloved Anything Is Possible, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin's Yours, Jean is a powerful novel about small town manners and the loneliness that drives people to do things they never imagined.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950539147
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lee Martin is the author of five novels, including The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He has also published three memoirs and two short story collections, most recently The Mutual UFO Network, in addition to the craft book, Telling Stories. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

Editorial Reviews

Written with a deep and wide-ranging compassion that is rare these days, Yours, Jean is a mesmerizingly beautiful novel. Whether he is writing from the point of view of a lonesome middle-aged mother, or a young woman beginning her life with expectant joy and wonder, or a confused teenage boy or girl, or men and women trying to find themselves in any way they can, even if that means harming another, Lee Martin evokes them all with a breathtakingly poetic grace that penetrates the essential mystery of what it means to be human. Lee Martin is a master, and Yours, Jean is one of the finest novels I’ve read in years.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

"Readers expect either a true-crime page turner or a literary novel of exquisite prose—unless Lee Martin is doing the writing, and then they get both. In Yours, Jean ancient passions burn through the facade of small-town grace in a story that simply won’t let go, as Lee Martin proves again why he is one of the most gifted writers of our time."
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

"Like his highly acclaimed The Bright Forever, Lee Martin’s latest novel, Yours, Jean, is based on a true crime. And, like that earlier narrative, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the interplay of rich details and raw emotions that Martin so masterfully unfolds in his latest novel makes you ache for the lonely men and women he tenderly brings to life in this powerful story about a murder and the lasting impact it has on a close-knit community."
—Linda Kass, Gramercy Books

From the Publisher

2020-03-02
The fifth novel from Martin, based on a real crime in small-town Illinois in 1952, begins with the on-campus murder of Jean De Belle on the first day of her first job as a high school librarian.

Jean has come to town after breaking her engagement and severing ties with hard-drinking salesman Charlie Camplain. She’s moved into an upstairs room in the home of a student and her mother, a widowed English teacher whose affection for her protégé and lodger strikes some in town as suspicious. The book’s first hundred pages, which detail Charlie’s clamorous arrival in town to win Jean back, the crime, and his capture, are a bit flat and desultory, but Martin gains his footing at the novel’s midpoint, where the book's impelling force changes from plot to psychology and where its focus turns to the crime’s beautifully mapped aftershocks. We follow the lonely, lovelorn middle-aged hotel clerk who summoned a cab for Charlie and noticed his gun; the toothless, good-natured cab driver who ended up playing a pivotal role in his capture; the high school boy pressed into service as an unwitting getaway driver on what was already the worst day of his life; that boy's estranged and anguished girlfriend, Robbie McVeigh; and the novel’s moral center and best element, Robbie's mother, Mary Ellen, the landlady, confidante, and accused lover of Miss De Belle, who stubbornly refuses to defend herself or to submit to the binary "Is she or isn't she?" thinking that the school board and fellow townspeople demand of her. In the end, Martin creates a subtle and intricate portrait of small-town mores and of the after echoes and reverberations, for those who've witnessed it, of sudden, shocking violence.

A wobbly start, but eventually Martin—like the complex woman he's conjured—finds his way.

Kirkus Reviews