Narrated in an entertaining, comic tone, but serious at heart, this is the story of the Hathway family in Baltimore in the late 1970s: a portrait of their eccentricities, and what happens when one child's negligence permanently alters the life of his brother.

Puchner is the author of the acclaimed story collection Music Through The Floor

Set in Southern California in the mid-eighties, MODEL HOME tells the comically serious story of the Zillers, a downwardly mobile family who become victims of the false promise of the ‘80s economic boom. Spanning issues of race and class, the rise of gated communities and exurban sprawl,, and our diminishing sense of connectedness, it’s a portrait of one family’s relationship to its own diverse blend of personalities which—through a series of comic misunderstandings—ends in tragedy.

Warren, the father, has squandered all the Zillers’ money on a disastrous real estate development in the desert; as their belongings are slowly repossessed, he’s forced into increasingly elaborate lies to hide the truth from his family.  Camille, his wife, has misinterpreted his secrecy and convinced herself that Warren is having an affair.  Meanwhile, their children have troubles of their own: Dustin, their handsome eldest son, gets seduced into the drug-addled world of his girlfriend’s emotionally troubled younger sister.  Lyle, their misanthropic daughter, falls in love with a Mexican security guard, whose fate becomes dangerously entangled with the Zillers'.  And Jonas, haunted by death at age eleven, becomes strangely obsessed with a mentally retarded girl who’s been abducted from the neighborhood. 

When one of them falls prey to an avoidable accident, the Zillers are forced to move into Warren’s uninhabited development in the middle of the desert. In this strange new “model home,” they must reckon with their guilt and failure–as well as with the mystery of who’s to blame—against the surreal, darkly absurd backdrop of the American exurbs.

By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Model Home is a masterful display of Eric Puchner's prodigious gifts, and of his penetrating insight -- into an unusual family and into the nature of human connection.

Acclaimed, award-winning author: Music Through the Floor was a Booksense Notable Pick. a Borders Original Voices selection, and a finalist for the NY Public Library's Young Lions Award and the California Book Award.  Puchner has also won a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and others. Francine Prose selected a story for 2005's Best New American Voices.  He has received a Wallace Stegner fellowship and in 2006 he was awarded a NEA grant.

Insight into characters: Every review praised Puchner's unique insight.  Of the stories, Elle said he captures "the existence of ordinary people, then glimpses in their circumscribed worlds scraps of the extraordinary, the spectacular, or the grotesque.” He possesses the same rare instinct of Joshua Ferris, Maile Meloy, or Elizabeth McCracken.

Timely subject: Although Puchner began the novel long before the economic crisis and although it is set in the 80s, Puchner's story of a downwardly mobile family losing their suburban home and livelihood because of a failed real estate investment eerily dovetails with current headlines.

Puchner teaches at Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux Fellow. His short stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Zoetrope: All Story, The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, Best New American Voices 2005, and other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Music Through the Floor. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel.

Prasa o książce:

People magazine, 4 Stars

A clever send-up of the Reagan-era's Morning in America mentality, this debut novel centers on Warren Ziller, a California real estate developer going for broke. Literally. His big bet on a desert housing complex is bankrupting his toxic family, though he's keeping that news to himself. But when the Chrysler disappears from his Palos Verdes driveway and the furniture guys haul away the living room set, his mixed-up kids (one son wears all orange) get suspicious. A neighbor notices that Warren seems "a bit...on edge." Wife Camille, a loopy sex-ed videomaker (Earth to My Body: What's Happening?), remains oblivious-gleefully charging a cashmere shawl to take her mind off the couple's loveless marriage. Worried that her husband is cheating (she's premature on that), Camille aims a garden hose at the shirts Warren is air-drying in order to save on cleaning bills. Just as you're settling in to the quaint days of pay phones and Atari video games, a ghastly incident turns the second half of the book into a wrenching series of soul-searching episodes. Puchner's well-constructed tale of a house of pain built on a foundation of secrets echoes Updike and Easton Ellis. After spending time with these suburban strivers, though, you'll be glad the '80s are long gone.

 

San Francisco magazine, Grade: A

Like his acclaimed short-story collection, Music Through the Floor, former San Franciscan Eric Puch­ner’s powerful first novel is much more than the sum of its deceptively simple parts. The curtains open, as they do in so many contem­porary novels filling remainder bins across the country, on an apparently flawless mid­dle-class couple and their discontents. It’s the 1980s in Southern California, and the Zillers are hiding secrets: Warren, a defeated real-estate developer, has yet to admit to his family that they are near bankruptcy; his wife, Camille, nurses resent­ment behind her persistent optimism. They have a pair of mismatched teenagers—effortlessly popular Dustin and pale, sullen Lyle—and 11-year-old Jonas, pre­cocious but curiously disconnected, who floats through rooms like a foreign-exchange student making the best of an awkward homestay. But Puchner has greater, darker plans for the Zillers. About halfway through Model Home, he slams them with a domestic apocalypse. It would be unfair to say more about this turn of events, other than that it is perfectly timed and perfectly dreadful. The author then carefully, compassionately sticks around for a hundred more pages to help the Zillers pick up the pieces of their lives. After tragedy, a tender partial redemption.

The New York Times

If there’s a bad choice available, a member of the Ziller family will make it in this first novel by Eric Puchner. Warren Ziller has moved his family from small-town Wisconsin to Southern California, chasing dreams of success as a real-estate developer. But the government is building a toxic-waste dump next to his site, and the bank is threatening to foreclose. His eldest son, Dustin, has fantasies of making it big in a punk band — the book is set in the mid-80s and includes shout-outs to California bands like Hüsker Dü and X — but is dangerously attracted to his girlfriend’s disturbed little sister. Warren’s wife, Camille, makes educational films for the local school system that manage to offend both the left and the right. Early in the book she pauses and thinks of her life: “She wanted to drop what she was doing and grab Warren by the shirt, to scream into his face like one of those hysterical victims in a disaster movie: We’re lost! Danger! Our lives are in peril!” Needless to say, she doesn’t.

 

The Boston Globe

Award-winning short-story writer Eric Puchner’s debut novel is about nothing less than the conflicts at the heart of American life: the pursuit of all too-often illusory prosperity and what happens when people in a culture that tells them they make their own fate confront the brutal realities of chance.

 

The Zillers are recent transplants from Wisconsin to the gated community of Herradura Estates in Los Angeles. Warren Ziller has moved his family there to take his career in real estate development to the multimillion-dollar level. His wife, Camille, misses her friends in Wisconsin, but enjoys their new, luxurious life. Their oldest son, Dustin, loves California and is convinced he and his band are going to write a new chapter in the history of LA punk. Lyle, their bookish 16-year-old daughter, hates Southern California, hates her inability to suntan, and hates, well, just about everything. Their 11-year-old Jonas is intelligent, remote and extremely odd (some days he dresses entirely in orange). Now he would be placed somewhere on the autistic spectrum. But this is 1985, so Jonas is just strange.

Warren wonders just how long he can keep his family from finding out they’re broke. A nearby city put an industrial waste dump next to Auburn Fields, the housing development that was going to make them rich. He hasn’t sold a single unit. His car’s been repossessed. He told his family it was stolen. They have no savings left: It all went to Auburn Fields.

 

Meanwhile the personal lives of some Zillers start to spiral out of control: Camille wonders whether an affair is the cause of Warren’s distractedness, and her recent detachment from her husband at times flares into outright hostility. Dustin finds himself drawn to his girlfriend’s self-mutilating younger sister. Lyle starts having sex with the gawky new gate attendant at Herradura Estates but refuses to acknowledge him in public.

Soon seemingly unrelated decisions and mistakes by Warren, Dustin, and Lyle fit together like the pieces of a horrifying puzzle, and being penniless is suddenly the least of their worries.

“Model Home’’ tells the story of what happens when all your dreams are destroyed and how you keep going after a tragedy you could never have imagined. But at times it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. Puchner is an extraordinarily talented writer. He’s a master of mood and tone, able to make moments of pure hilarity follow heartbreak with the seamlessness of real life.

 

And every character is perfectly realized. Puchner beautifully conveys Lyle’s teen angst: “Lyle wanted to murder her mother. She would strangle her slowly and then dump her out of the car and drive to New York, where she’d never have to wear shorts and where it was okay - sophisticated even - not to be tan.’’ He also takes you straight into the mind of the Zillers’s distant, incomprehensible son Jonas: “His mother had begun to kiss him lately, as if to make sure he was still there, but her need to keep proving it all the time only made him feel more like a ghost.’’

 

“Model Home’’ also provides a panoramic view of American life. In this novel, Puchner takes us into wealthy suburban homes, trailer parks, the back rooms of ice cream parlors, and Grateful Dead concerts. His characters include a son of Mexican immigrants who works all day and goes to school at night, a trio of itinerant thieves, and a professional Jesus impersonator.

This book deftly captures the ’80s, a decade of illusory wealth, tawdry spectacle, and willful innocence - which also makes it the perfect novel for our time.

 

 

Autor: Eric Puchner

Data dodania: 2010-02-20