Lee

After an absence of several decades, the aging and curmudgeonly Leland Pefley returns to his hometown to find that nothing is as he remembers it, and everything has gone to the dogs. Armed with nothing but a cane to ward away vice and to impose decorum and justice on the insolent decadence of his times, the erudite Lee sets out on a desperate quest to find a shred of intelligence in his contemporaries, prepared to beat it out of them if necessary. Propelled thence on a series of unlikely adventures, he finds himself at the heart of a story pitting nostalgia against modernity and the old against the new, in a scathing commentary on the decline of our society, and a hilarious and anguishing tale of an old man walking arm-in-arm with death.

The first edition of Lee was published in 1991 by Four Walls Eight Windows, and received excellent reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader and The New England Review of Books. The second edition was published in 2007 by Penguin. This is the third edition.