The Lives of Riley Chance — Robert Bausch

I've been here before, says Riley Chance. I mean way before. I never knew it until a few years ago—when I was fifteen. I had no idea until that time. We lived in Chicago, and I just believed I was like everyone else—except I did worry about things my mother thought were rather odd. But that's not the beginning. I have to start at the beginning. The first time I was here I lived in Penn­sylvania with a man named Benjamin Ezra and his wife. I have never been able to remember her name, so I just made one up after a while. You can probably tell what I remember of her by the name I gave her: I call her Ogra. Thus begins Riley Chance's extraordi­nary tale of the fortunes and misfortunes of his three lives: first as Kenny Ezra, the son of a factory worker at the Demon Match Company in Wilkes-Barre at the turn of the century; then as Jack Pitt, a boy growing up with his much loved mother in Washington, D.C., during the Depression; and finally as Riley Chance, a strange child born in 1954 who, after a startling sequence of events when he is in his teens, can never again see himself simply as Gus and Myra Chance's son. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny, often luminously beautiful, and always profoundly imaginative and moving, The Lives of Riley Chance is the dazzlingly orig­inal work by the author whose first novel, On the Way Home, established him as an important and powerful voice in American fiction.