From the Big Apple to apple pie. After losing his high stress job, Carl tries to simplify his life by moving to the Midwest and returning to school to learn from his literary idol. Far away from the traffic, the noise, the crowds and the skyscrapers, Carl finds chaos, like cream, still rises to the top; love, lactivists and one handed bartenders remind him he's not in New York anymore.
Raw is the story of a man who takes adversity - the loss of a high paying, high powered job - and turns it into chaos in his quest to simplify his life. Moving from Manhattan NY to Manhattan KS, pursuing a dream to work with, learn from and one day become the peer of his hero, an acclaimed writer long since considered washed up. Despite his research, analysis and outlines, his plan follows a course that is anything but precise; detoured and sometimes derailed by characters and events he could never have invented; a one handed bartender, an underground dairy, a man named President McKinley, and militant members of a lactation support group.
Professional Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Revare’s novel features graduate creative writing professors, big business bad guys, vindictive ex-wives and a one-armed (well, one-handed) train engineer.
Carl Krauthammer seems to have it all—a lucrative business career, an ambitious wife and relatively few responsibilities. But when he’s canned from his position because of a corporate takeover—by the disjunctively-named Bland Corporation—he’s both out of a job and out of a marriage. At the age of 37 he moves to the “other” Manhattan, in Kansas, to study in a fiction-writing program under the tutelage of Jules Frye, a National Book Award nominee who hasn’t written anything (or anything worthwhile) for a number of years. Carl also meets Susan, a beguiling and seductive English professor who happens to be Jules’s former lover. Deciding that Jules is the kind of author who can definitely make or break a writer’s career, Carl assiduously curries his favor, flattering Jules and appealing to his substantial and inflated ego. It turns out Jules has his own agenda, however—he literally digs up a manuscript he’d buried a few years earlier and enlists Carl’s help in doing “research” for his novel. The plot—both of Jules’s work-in-progress and of Revare’s novel—involves a train wreck that years before had been caused by some La Leche terrorists—“lactivists”—and Susan had been entangled in these lacteal politics. Now her son, Ocean, is associated with an underground company that processes raw milk, and the Bland Company is trying to do a hostile takeover of this business as well. It turns out that unbeknownst to Carl, Jules is manipulating his knowledge to write a kind of roman-a-clef, all the while claiming that it’s an original work of fiction, and Carl, now romantically tied to Susan, wants to expose Jules’s secret—that his creative writing is not so creative after all.
A good read populated by idiosyncratic characters.
Ireland 1945. Florence Kite finds a letter and her whole world crumbles. Marcus Fanning was her real father. But twenty-five years ago, Marcus Fanning vanished off the face of the earth.
