Jesse Kellerman, playwright and novelist, released his second novel today.
Trouble follows a Good Samaritan in New York who quickly finds out that no good deed goes unpunished. He saves a woman from being murdered, but accidently kills her attacker. The police find this suspicious, the man's family wants revenge, and his employers aren't very happy about all the attention he's suddenly getting.
Kellerman is a talented writer with a flair for quirky characters and situations. I was quite taken earlier this year with his 3m1w--a collection of short plays I'd very much like to see on stage. I was also fascinated with Sunstroke, an intense novel that takes several unexpected turns.
In an interview with Book Help Web, Kellerman said:
It will be interesting to see how that philosophy carries over in Trouble.
I tend to believe that an individual's personality is more compelling than his or her culture. Which is not to say that culture is irrelevant; merely that I think we overvalue it. And since I'm most often interested in characters who stand out, who are exceptional, rather than a predictable product of their social machinery, it's precisely the salient features of their personality that obsess me as a writer — not what defines them on a census form.
