A Better Class of People
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
A brilliant novel-in-stories from award-winning author Robert Lopez
In an uncanny, distorted version of New York City, a man rides the subway through the chaos of an ordinary commute. He may have a gun in his pocket. He may be looking for someone—a woman named Esperanza.
Between stops, we shuttle back and forth through time and see a man who stands in traffic, the same man seizing and shuddering on a sidewalk, an institution where the man is housed with other undesirables (or troublemakers?), a neighborhood where all the residents have forgotten their names. Over everything looms the specter of a nameless menace, a pervasive sense that something—more than just a ride—is coming to an end.
With Robert Lopez’s signature innovation, A Better Class of People delivers a network of stories interconnected and careening like subway tunnels through the realities of modern America: immigration, gun violence, police brutality, sexual harassment, climate change, and the point of fracture at which we find ourselves, where reality and perception are indistinguishable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lopez returns with a weird and wildly imaginative outing (after All Back Full) that jumps around in time with a highly unreliable narrator. The unnamed protagonist tells the reader he's not named Will ("in case you were wondering," he says). He begins his days standing in traffic, a form of exercise that might be an experiment (a sort of anti-explanation emerges: "I'm not one to volunteer information. If they ask I'll tell them it's to stretch my legs or get some air"). He has worked on TV or at an office where he was sexually harassed, or maybe he was a professional tennis player or a mediocre bartender. What's clear is he suffers from an allergy to gluten and loves pie and guns, or so he says, but he can't remember. He sweats a lot and talks about living at the beginning of a new ice age, and while it's all a bit confusing, Lopez's sinewy prose and dark lines have a touch of humor at their core: "Sometimes I think of myself as a contestant on a game show but I don't know the rules or what I'm supposed to do or if anyone is watching." It's a peculiar if winning look at an American psyche on overdrive.
