High Strung
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Years after running away from America and the mysteries surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing trash novels at X Publishing in West London and shacked up with a drug-addled diplomat's son. Shaky and defeated, she heads home to Florence, Ohio, with no money and no idea of what to do next.
Meanwhile, Merle discovers that her brother Olin, rich and successful from marketing Marilyn Monroe meat thermometers, is poised to embark on a dubious performance art career, and that her stodgy father might be falling in love after years of living alone. As Merle looks for clues about her mother's life she uncovers disturbing new truths about her own romantic failings. She suspects she's never really escaped her old life; she's simply dragged it along with her, "like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but impossible to get rid of." But with the help of her tough-talking grandmother, free-spirited brother, and a pilot who nurses a failing plane, Merle finally begins to face her family's checkered past and her own uncertain future.
In vivid cinematic prose, High Strung balances humor on the rough edge of loss, regret, and wounded family love. Merle is an unforgettable creation in an exhilarating debut novel from a young writer to watch.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After 10 years in London copyediting porn novels, a weary 32-year-old American returns to her Ohio hometown in Dalton's breezy first novel. All the important plot elements are revealed in the first few pages of the snappily paced first-person narrative: Merle Winslow has left her strange, sexual role playing English boyfriend, Terence, and her vaguely sketched life back in England to come home to the truncated family outside of Cleveland that she had fled a decade before. Merle's father, widowed after her alcoholic mother died with her lover in a car accident when Merle was 12, plans to marry again, while Merle's younger single brother, Olin, is floundering in his career after an early windfall invention (a Marilyn Monroe barbecue thermometer). The drama of their parents' swift Oklahoma courtship and marriage still haunts Merle, as does the 1970 student bombing of a local Ohio college building; her mother had been photographed there (while pushing Merle in a stroller) and consequently labeled a subversive. Merle claims she has returned because she is "tired of being alone in the world," but she and her family and friends don't seem to have missed each other much or to be able to express it if they did. Merle is a plucky, chin-up character who wittily tempers her self-pity, yet the novel relies too much on small exchanges, the narrative pinched within the limited scope that short story writer Dalton allows it.
