Praeder's letters

by James Baker Hall

"In 1955, Paul Praeder, poet and Coast Guard radio operator posted in the cultural isolation of San Juan, writes a letter to Billy Baxter Adams, a young poet who has just published a poem dedicated to Praeder. The letter, effusive with thanks but also gruff, arrogant, and filled with self-deprecating humor, immediately sets the tone and draws the reader in to this astonishing novel-in-verse. The story unfolds over the span of thirty years with Praeder's last letter dated 1985. In the course of those three decades we watch with growing alarm and fascination as Praeder - an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman's Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad's Captain Kurtz - manages to fatally meld his protege Billy's life and loves with his own. Praeder manipulates, cajoles, lies, flatters, and advises his disciple into a tangle of betrayal and reversals, until finally the teacher becom