You Were Wrong
A Novel
By Matthew Sharpe
September 2010
$14.00
192 pp
5.5 x 8.25 in
Paperback with Flaps
By Matthew Sharpe
From "an heir to John Barth and kin to David Foster Wallace" (Booklist), a deft, comic story of love, fatherhood, and murder.
It is 2008 in the suburban town of Seacrest, Long Island. Twenty-six-year-old high school math teacher Karl Floor has no parents, no friends, few prospects, is a dim bulb, and lives at home with Larchmont Jones, the aggressively loquacious widower of Karl's mother. One fine afternoon, Karl returns to his house after work to discover a beautiful stranger in the upstairs hallway. She is Sylvia Vetch, and claims to be robbing him. She also asks for his protection, but won't quite say from what or whom, and draws him into troubles she won't elucidate.
No Sherlock Holmes, Karl still slowly begins to see and engage the complex forces that have been shaping his life: his parentage and inheritance, morality and law, the racial and economic geography of present-day New York City and the world at large.
Darkly funny and original, You Were Wrong is a surreal detective story told with heart, wit, and a singular voice.
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Advance Praise for You Were Wrong:
“A sharply funny, almost old-fashioned social farce with the structure of a P.G. Wodehouse comedy of errors and the bitter wit of a John Kennedy Toole — this is a sweet, oddly romantic satire for the recovering cynics among us.”—Lydia Millet, Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys
“This book is strange, original and devastatingly clever.”—Mary Gaitskill
Reviews for You Were Wrong:
A great review in the Washington Times of Matt Sharpe’s You Were Wrong
Edward Champion includes Matt Sharpe’s You Were Wrong on his list of underrated books of the year on The Millions…
"Matthew Sharpe, You Were Wrong – Lips are “two fat garden slugs making love.” There is “no worse violation of a soul than hope.” We’re told that “tones can be tough for everyone and were extratough for Karl, who was lately an avid pupil in the urgent remedial project of tones.” Sometimes the reader is subtly addressed. Sometimes not. There is a curious precision to the description in the way the “midafternoon sunbeam entered the house through a bedroom window to the right.” These are just some of the many nonsequitur joys (or planned pleasures?) to be found within Matthew Sharpe’s extremely goofy and very enjoyable novel, which seems to be channeling Flann O’Brien’s madcap spirit."—The Millions
“[Sharpe is] able to take a metaphor one or three steps further than expected, sparking surprise and, often, laughter…[a] gifted comic novelist.”—Los Angeles Times. Read review.
Matthew Sharpe discussing You Were Wrong on KPCC’s (Southern CA NPR) “The Madeleine Brand Show”
“Fans of Sharpe’s previous work as well as contemporary fiction authors such as Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace should seek out this darkly comic novel.”—Library Journal
“A pleasing odd and intelligent novel…What’s most winning about YOU WERE WRONG is its acumen and the brio with which [Sharpe’s] sentence-making bears it out. The book is rich with devastatingly comic observations about people, places, and things. YOU WERE WRONG might not save your life, but never mind; Matthew Sharpe is saving prose from the banal, one word at a time.” —New York Times Book Review
“Matthew Sharpe sets himself some high hurdles to clear in a novel that can cautiously be characterized as offbeat. Sullen, sluggish, and self-involved as any teenager, Karl is not a natural hero. To raise the ante, Sharpe uses an edgy, ironic narrative voice that keeps us guessing where to place our emotional bets. With craft and wit he meets the challenge, producing one of the weirdest love stories we’re likely to read anytime soon.”—Boston Globe. Read review.
“The pleasure of Sharpe's work is in his characters' rants, arias and monologues, and his crisp, outlandish humor. It's hard to resist a tale in which a boy stands "lonely as a bowling trophy" and a pool table and a piano "sit side by side like a pair of hippopotami cooling in the river of bourgeois culture."—Barnes & Noble Review. Read review.
“Sharpe writes prose that is mellifluous and lucid; his wise writing, with its offbeat rhythms and casual swerves, merits rank with that of George Saunders, Jim Shepard, and perhaps a (much) less bilious Sam Lipsyte. YOU WERE WRONG is deft, lively, and surprising: a practically faultless book.”—Bookforum
"Expertly crafted...Perhaps the best thing about You Were Wrong, is Sharpe’s willingness to beat up his characters. These are real people we’re watching, and Sharpe refuses to romanticize them. At story’s end, we leave bruised but proud, more sure of ourselves, with some kind of direction.—Brooklyn Rail. Read full review.
“Part warped fairy tale, part nerd noir, part hallucinogenic misfit fiction, part sly social critique, Sharpe’s wicked story of class and race, love and hate, is venomously funny and whiplash smart.”—Booklist
Take a look at Matt’s playlist on the New York Times “Paper Cuts” blog.
Here are some of Matt’s videos that were featured in Shelf Awareness.
Matt Sharpe on PW blog PWxyz's list of the most underrated authors.
And FiveChapters is running the first two chapters of YOU WERE WRONG this week.
“A painfully funny book…YOU WERE WRONG is even riskier than Sharpe’s previous novel, JAMESTOWN. There, the sides were clear and the joke easier to parse. Here, Sharpe refuses to let the reader catch him winking. It’s a bold move, one that pays off in many places. The novel is about the failures of men, and it’s dedicated to the year 2008, a time when the rot at the root of another male-dominated institution, our economy, was finally revealed. Sharpe’s novel works like those warning signs we now wished we’d noted, telling us that something essential is broken.” —Publishers Weekly
