Rowdy Talbot isn’t the world’s greatest bull rider. Not even close. But he lives by the cowboy code, and he never forgets to take off his hat during the national anthem.
When Rowdy wins the rodeo in Crockett County, Colorado, he celebrates his triumph with two young Frenchwomen he meets in a local bar. The next morning, when he discovers that the two have left for Paris with the championship belt buckle he won, Rowdy does what any true cowboy would do: He hops a plane to the City of Light to retrieve it.
What will the age of assisted living be like for boomers who longed for the Age of Aquarius? It’s 2022, and Guy Fontaine, a widower from Oklahoma, finds himself committed to a California old-folks facility where the flamboyant residents have reverted to the pursuits of their glory days, the late 1960s. Pot smoking, group sex, a rock band called Acid Reflux, cliques formed according to where you were during the Summer of Love, and the motto “don’t trust anyone under sixty” all make for a wild, sometimes grotesque milieu. All this is overseen by a bitchy director who treats the oldsters like idiot children and a staff doctor who overmedicates them. When Guy inadvertently jump-starts an insurrection, the hippies, old hands at civil disobedience, take over the compound.
RC Nash, a journalist returning from a bungled European assignment, and Jimmy Sebastiano, a small-time Mafia bagman who is carrying $656K for delivery to his boss, improbably share a cab from Dulles to downtown D.C. RC gets home to find his girlfriend gone and his entire wardrobe cut into bite-size pieces; Jimmy surprises his girlfriend, the eponymous Honey, in flagrante delicto with someone who looks vaguely familiar. Turns out it’s the President who, in his haste to leave, trips on his shorts, hits his head and dies. What to do with the body of the President? Enter Secret Service men; a gay Washington Redskins third-stringer’ a Mafia don whose name is Rat’s Ass and his savvy grandson; a coke-snorting VP; a First Lady who used to be a jazzercise instructor; the C.I.A., F.B.I. and a few walk-ons from the local Damien’s Donuts.
Kelly Palamino is not – I repeat, NOT – crazy. Yes, water does talk to him: his toilet tells him to eat fish; his Water Pik quotes Ezra Pound. His ex-wife denies they were ever married and is actively seeking to have him committed. But Kelly Palamino is not crazy. Lost? Yes… but not crazy.
Loren Paul, a 35-year-old writer of westerns, sits on an isolated Wyoming mountaintop in a semi-delirious state from a long fast, waiting for divine guidance. He is literally waiting to hear from God, since he feels that God has a lot of explaining to do. Loren wants to know, for example, why his only child disappeared on a camping trip many years ago, a tragedy that led to the death of his first wife. And why has his second and current wife, Lana Sue, a sexy and free-spirited country-and-western singer, taken to the open road, forsaking their idyllic domestic nest? Despite the end-of-the-line sense of desperation evoked by this situation, this is a droll and high-spirited novel about the eccentric lives and loves of Loren and his footloose wife.
The Grovont Trilogy:
Sam Callahan uses a rich fantasy life to mask the fact that he has had to be father to his own mother because she is too young and immature to take care of herself and her own father treats her like a bought pariah. Exiled to rural Wyoming in the fall of 1963, they survive by building real connections to real people for the first time in their lives. For Sam, the transformation begins on the day of JFK’s death, when he comforts Maurey Pierce, the only kid in his grade who can read besides Sam. Maurey’s Stepford mother, cowboy father and Dennis the Menace brother drive her to make an unusual pact with Sam: together, they will learn sex so that when they want to have it with someone they really desire, they will know what to do.
This book follows Maurey, after she has Sam’s baby, marries her horrid high school sweetheart, and loses custody of her second baby after leaving him on top of the Bronco as she drives off in a drunken stupor. It follows her journey to find her soul and sobriety. This is not a Christian book, a religious book or a tract in favor of Alcoholics Anonymous. Quite the contrary. But it is very much a book about how an individual might need a whole lot of friends to support her getting her act together.
Some consider it a social blunder to use the wrong fork, but Sam Callahan, the narrator of this ribald and tangled yarn, would never make such a mundane faux pas. For Sam, every goof is a doozy and his missteps are at least as comic and bawdy as they are tragic. It’s 1984, Sam is 33 and his second wife has just left him. He lives in North Carolina with his 19-year-old daughter, born to him and an eighth-grade classmate. Sam never knew his birth father’s identity: his mother claims to have been gang-raped by five high-school football players, which has left Sam with an abhorrence of men and of conventional sex as well. The impending divorce puts Sam in a mind to get his life together, so he spontaneously introduces himself to four out of five of his possible dads.
He fails to consider the repercussions this will have in the men’s families; he’s attacked by two of his possible half-brothers, seduced by his could-be stepmother and charmed by his potential half-sister. To say that Sam brings on his own calamities would be an understatement, yet his absurd logic in matters of romance, lust and paternity is oddly endearing
