Modern Ranch Living
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Publisher Description
'Poirier is a wonderful creator of situations ... His great creation here is Kendra ... Poirier makes you feel trapped in his characters' own predicaments. This is America as it really is ... Superb' Guardian
'One of the most kinetic, original young fiction writers we've read in a long time' Esquire
The weather is hotter than hell in Tucson, Arizona, and weird things are afoot in the crumbling desert community of Rancho Sin Vacas.
Sixteen-year-old Kendra hones her muscles and grapples with bad grammar, occasionally worrying about her brother, Thomas, who spends all day watching wrestling on TV. Their neighbour Merv is stuck in a rut, still living at home at thirty and looking after his troubled mother. When the strung-out teenager from over the road, Kendra's sometime-boyfriend, goes missing it affects them all in different and surprising ways.
And although Kendra is apparently unconcerned, claiming that he's just run away, she can't shake the feeling that something strange is in the air this summer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Short story writer and novelist Poirier (Naked Pueblo; Goats; etc.) is making a name for himself as a chronicler of the surreal everyday life of the suburban Southwest. In his panoramic, essentially plotless second novel, he captures the aimless, air-conditioner-blasted, pop-culture-saturated nature of existence in Tucson, Ariz. During the summer of 2001, Kendra Lumm and Merv Hunter have nothing in common except proximity. She's a teenaged fitness fanatic, he's the 30-year-old manager of a Splash World, and they both live with their parents in Rancho Sin Vacas, a sprawling gated community in the desert outside Tucson, where growth occurs "at the rate of an acre an hour." Kendra is seeing an anger management therapist, and Merv is trying, halfheartedly, to determine whether he'll always be a loser who lives with his sleepwalking insomniac mother. When a Magic Marker sniffing juvenile neighbor suddenly disappears, filling everyone with concern and foreboding, the protagonists begin to address their own problems. Kendra and Merv cross paths only occasionally, but their parallel pursuits of happiness are similarly baffled and good-natured. Kendra's strange Valley Girl like speech patterns ("plussing as which") add a baroque touch to this deadpan expedition into a weird corner of the American psyche.
