King of the World: A Novel - Hardcover

A mock coronation opens this brilliant novel about the harrowing but erotically charged 15-year marriage of fluttery Ginny and seductive, psychotic Michael Fisher, who dubs Ginny "Queen of the World" with a broken starfish, then drowns her dog on a rowboat trip. Lusting for control, Michael abuses Ginny and their adopted baby while claiming to love them, and squanders the family goods on get-rich schemes. The novel, set in California, exquisitely delineates the pair's mutual dependency: Ginny, with a malformed spine, insecure and fixated on a man who outrages the staid respectability of her Jewish parents; Michael, with his boiling sexuality and criminal behavior, gradually subsumed by madness and self-pity. Ginny's efforts to disentangle herself bring her to offbeat therapist Annie, then a job-training program and a shelter for battered women. Images of water--fishing, floating and drowning--converge in the couple's turbulent waterbed, which Michael finally slashes and nails to the bedroom wall. This newest novel by seasoned fiction writer Gerber ( Honeymoon ) won Pushcart's eighth annual Editors' Book Award.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cut off from her family and painfully insecure because of a curved spine, Ginny needs Michael's unexpected love. At first this love is tender, but it becomes more and more tyrannical. Michael was himself a victim of child abuse, and now his impotent rage masquerades as virility. Eventually his pathological behavior drives his wife and adopted child to a shelter for battered women. Gerber here counters Michael's growing depravity with Ginny's increasing strength and self-confidence. Though she displays the horrors of family violence with brutal frankness, she also provides many interior views that allow us to understand Michael's paranoia. Her story is emotionally powerful but never maudlin.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.