Print edition: 
For his seventh novel, Pete Dexter returns to small-town Georgia, the setting for 1998’s “Paris Trout,” his grim and gripping National Book Award winner.
This time Dexter has other perch to fry.
Spooner is the author’s Tristram Shandy, an often bawdy bildungsroman. The title character comes into this world, like Elvis, with a stillborn twin. He’s a kid whose instincts and urges are warped right from the cradle. Combine Spooner’s bent nature with poor impulse control and a notable lack of remorse, and you have the makings of a chronic headache for the boy’s honorable stepfather, until recently an exceptional naval officer with a promising career.
Kind, fair and preternaturally patient, the man finds himself saddled with a chronic and incomprehensible reprobate.
As always, Dexter is a lapidary stylist with a keen and unsparing eye for the world.
What distinguishes “Spooner” from Dexter’s previous work is that it is funny. Really funny. It is more in the vein of John Irving than the author’s customary white- knuckle prose.
At one point, Spooner sits through a performance of Tchaikovsky by his most respectable relative, a classical pianist. “He enjoyed his uncle’s concerts, except for the music, and wondered sometimes what the tunes would have sounded like in English.”
About 200 pages in, you realize, not without alarm, that the novel is a diaphanously veiled account of the life and times of one Pete Dexter.
As a young man, Spooner gets a job as a reporter by walking into a newspaper office in Florida on a whim, an anecdote Dexter has often told about his own experience.
The mirror aspect of the book continues as Spooner moves to Philadelphia, going to work for the Daily News (where Dexter made his bones).
He finds his calling as a columnist one day early in his tenure at the paper when he gets off the elevator at the wrong floor.
The problem with Dexter’s chronological, autobiographical approach is that Spooner spends the last portion of the book in relative seclusion with his wife and daughter on an island off the coast of Washington state.
The humor and the scope of the novel evaporate in this dull homey stretch, for much of the time, Spooner is consumed in a tedious dispute with his neighbors. It echoes the narrow-minded concerns of Spooner’s mother from early in the book, an irony that seems lost on our narrator.
In a sense, “Spooner” unfolds in three stages, the first two of which are vibrant. Sort of like life.
