THE LAMENTS
The Laments was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Wall Street Journal Editors’ Pick, A Book Sense Top Ten Pick, and a finalist in the Barnes & Noble Fall 2004 Discover Great New Writers Program, as well as a 2005 Summer Pick on Channel Four’s Richard & Judy’s Summer Read 2005, and won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
“A thrill ride: bleak, deep and hilarious . . . a family story on speed, with a jolt of black comedy that makes it a close relative to that greatest of all American family stories, The Simpsons."
—The New York Times Book Review
“Part travelogue, part melodrama and part tall tale, The Laments is the playful and heartfelt story of a family and a world that can’t sit still.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Hagen's prose has the bright tart tone of a Zadie Smith or Robertson Davies, as he sounds some gothic notes amid his farce. And his ear for the vernaculars of his various locales is impeccable.”
—The Seattle Times
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I began writing this novel after reading the unpublished memoirs of my grandfather, Aldem Slater, an artillery man with the South African Army in WWI. Slater's descriptions of firing off Howitzers, the tedium of duty and the charms of finding caches of cheese and wine in the shattered basements of deserted houses in Northern France were specific and riveting. The novel seemed to spring from these details.
Critics remarks about TOM BEDLAM:
“Tom Bedlam is a terrific book and, for all its nutty improbabilities, in the end a bracingly sane one. It's not a truly old-fashioned novel; it's not (thankfully) anything so crass as a postmodern "subversion" of traditional fiction either. Hagen, like his hero, finds his own way, neither turning his back on his ancestry nor allowing it entirely to determine him. Providence may or may not be involved, but the novel is good enough to persuade you to believe in it, or at least in its utility in storytelling. Say what you will about coincidences, Tom Bedlam demonstrates that in the hands of a writer like George Hagen, they can help fiction fulfill its most basic responsibility: to make an impossibly large and dangerous world small enough to see whole.”
-Terrence Rafferty
New York Times Book Review
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