Townie
A Novel
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Townie takes place in Oldon, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England village that has become the favored residence of the mega-rich, a town whose historic past has been preserved and polished until it gleams with the arrogant intensity of a Colonial theme park.
Alan Lowe inhabits a different Oldon, however, a town that he loved as a boy for the “power and rightness of its countryside.” Now, in early middle age, he finds himself living on the margins of the changing town, in a camp deep within Oldon Woods, “inelegantly sheltered by a stale, army-surplus sheet, perforated here and there with pinholes and rudely draped into the equivalent of a teepee.”
Then Alan’s seemingly rootless life converges with that of Arthur Worthy, a member of the recently-arrived elite, whose life “bristles with appointments, trips, activities, possessions, responsibilities, and business urgencies.” But Arthur lives on the margin, too, as alone and isolated in his mansion as Alan is in his teepee.
They share, as they discover, an unexpected connection, a woman named Anna, “who must be understood as a catalytic force in both of our lives, the intoxicating girl who devolved into the equable woman whose existence served to define our own.”
Alan abandons his camp in order to temporarily look after Arthur’s mansion and their lives soon become deeply intertwined in an adventure that is ostensibly a business deal but is, more essentially, a search for love and connection with place.
Townie is a picaresque novel of the countryside, funny and skewering about our social and business pretensions, moving and true about our need for roots and authenticity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Butman builds his inventive first novel around the art of the deal, pushing it in a dreamy, semiromantic direction. A rich resident of a tony New England village, Arthur Worthy, takes in the homeless narrator, Alan Lowe, christens him "Theo" and makes him his butler. Lowe, a former designer who is slumming his way through a shabby poverty charade, plays along with Worthy's game when the businessman asks him to come to London and perform a pivotal, trumped-up role in a high-stakes business meeting. The game takes an amusing turn when Worthy's erstwhile business partner shows up on their flight and gets himself arrested, allowing Lowe to meet one of the men he must fool. Despite the long odds, the deal goes smoothly until a series of bad judgments eliminates Worthy and his colleague from the final closing, leaving their fate in the hands of a phony indigent with no business experience. Butman's whimsical approach makes the odd conceit work, and he smartly steers clear of Lowe's midlife bitterness as he takes his plot through its strange twists and turns. The romantic subplot involving Anna, Worthy's ex-wife (who also turns out to be Lowe's childhood crush), is a dead end, but Butman introduces another entertaining subplot when Worthy beds a married woman just before he hits the road. Butman is a gifted writer with an excellent feel for his offbeat characters, but what makes this debut work is his ability to approach just about any situation as an arcane comedy of manners.