Green Gator Blues — David Jacobs

Four year-old Danny Newson lives in a conservative, Midwestern family of the early 1950s, a world he experiences in spurts of pleasure and confusion, love and nightmare. He records how his father contracts Multiple Sclerosis, and how the family comes to terms with the major changes in their lives in the decades that follow. This vivid and humorous novel is bound together by recurrent motifs like swimming, jazz, various animals, baseball, and sexuality. Dan is seldom self-conscious about these images: they arise naturally from his ways of seeing and thinking about the world. Indeed, Dan is rarely aware of how they structure both his life and the world that surrounds him. Dr. David L. Jacobs has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Wayne State University, the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Houston, where he is currently Professor of Art. This is his first novel.