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Brimming with passion, innocence, and humor, QWERTY offers readers a respite from contemporary fiction’s litany of griefs and morbidities. In this lyrical tale of the 1980s, the City of Roses is the enchanted realm in which Sparky, a fledgling writer, meets Mustang Sally, a pole-dancing cowgirl. The torrents of young love, swelled by the extravagant joy of writing, engulf the couple. In the wry, ribald, and raucous story within the story, they meet P. T. Barnum the Fifth and enlist in his scheme to stage an epic poetry slam featuring the infamous poet Wild Bill Ruckman. Dubbed the Big Bang, the event morphs into a Second Coming. Along the way we meet a menagerie of engaging characters, as comic farce abounds.
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Told posthumously by a friend, Danny O’Donnell’s story reads like an elegy, serves as an epitaph, and invites reflection on the imperatives of manhood. At the height of the Vietnam War, as a matter of conscience, Danny O’Donnell refused induction into the military, risking prison and winning the admiration of his future wife, Leah. But soon after their marriage, his courage failed him. Plagued by an enduring sense of cowardice, late in life he attempts to redeem himself with one fell swoop. Here, as in Joseph Conrad’s classic Lord Jim, a man’s “acute consciousness of lost honour” plays out with fatal consequences.