Cutting Lisa by Percival Everett. New York. 1986. Ticknor & Fields. 0899194125. 147 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Early one morning sixty-six-year-old John Livesey, a recently retired Virginia obstetrician, is called in on a bizarre case: a man with no medical training has successfully performed a Caesarean, without anesthesia, on his wife. The act itself appalls Livesey, but the man's uncompromising willfulness somehow moves him and continues to haunt him all the way to the Oregon coast, where he is to spend the summer with his son's family. Elgin worries that his widowed father may be at loose ends, but John is totally captivated by his granddaughter, starts an affair with a much younger woman, and drinks beer and eats bacon - to the horror of his fastidious daughter-in-law, Lisa. Lisa is pregnant, but something is amiss. In a dramatic mishap, John discovers the truth about Lisa's baby. Will he dare to play a wrathful God? In characteristically lean prose Percival Everett pits the harsh tenets of Old Testament retribution against a twentieth-century morality based on freedom of choice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.

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