The Hurt Runner Author:John Symonds The hurt runner is Feliks Crouch, a 19-year-old dward who lives with his rich unmarried, neurotic mother and his manic-depressive grandmother in one of fiction's most bizarre households. Inside Feliks' stunted body is a strong personality struggling to be normal and not wanting to be protected, and so Feliks storms into the everyday world of aff... more »airs by extorting a job from his wealthy natural father. The ultimate goal: enough money to buy a Nikon F camera.
Feliks will be the Toulouse-Lautrec of photography. He will photograph his grandmother's teen-aged nurse Agnes in fetching nude poses (he does) and then seduce her (however...).
What Feliks also does is get involved with one of his mother's rather disoriented lovers - and even more involved with his father's newest young wife.
Feliks is a great comic hero, with depth and humanity. He is hapless but also very intelligent. He is a classic loser - but a guardedly optimistic loser. Feliks is like most young people in midpassage: he wants to be loved and respected, but secretly expects the world to laugh at him for his defects - except that in Feliks' case the defects are cruelly apparent.
But even when disaster after disaster confirms his pessimistic outlook, Feliks endures. He is a person not easily forgotten.« less