Meet John Trow Hardback - 2002

by Dyja, Thomas L.

Steven Armour, though only forty, is already fighting off a midlife crisis-his once-brilliant career fizzling, his marriage going stale, his inner life taking strange, disorienting turns. Then, on an impulse, Steven joins a group of Civil War reenactors, and much to his own and everyone else's amazement, his life suddenly turns around. Assigned to portray a Connecticut private named John Trow, Steven throws himself into the weekend exercises with a zeal and confidence he never knew he possessed. He effortlessly masters the Union Army's complex drills, he bonds with the other men in his regiment, and he becomes infatuated, and then passionately obsessed with Polly Kellogg, the regiment captain's wife. Indeed, so thoroughly does Steven Armour embrace the ghostly life of Civil War Private John Trow that his own identity begins to slip through his fingers with deadly consequences.

"Chucking it all is an urge every twenty-first century American occasionally feels, or ought to. In Meet John Trow, Thomas Dyja uses that impulse to drive a novel that's part business satire, part domestic drama, part postmodern ghost story. And the whole thing works like a dream." (Kurt Anderson, bestselling author of Turn of the Century)