978-1-58838-029-6
1-58838-029-7
$25.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
331 pages
NewSouth Books
|
Waylon McPhee,
middle-aged, divorced, down-sized, moves back in with his widowed father
in hopes of coasting through another year along the Gulf Coast of Texas.
But his father is dating again, and his sisters, trying to manipulate
Waylon into asking their father for their inheritance before he gives it
away to a second wife, begin to crowd and pressure him. And then his
son, a cross-dressing Janis Joplin impersonator, shows up.
Adding to the pandemonium are an affair with
an obsessive married woman, some old high school acquaintances, and
Waylon’s renewed interest in the Prom Queen from his old high school,
the same school where Waylon has taken a job as a substitute teacher.
The sarcastic Waylon, juggling these characters and responsibilities
caustically but light-heartedly, moves through people and events hoping
to recover something he lost in his youth: enough inertia to reach
escape velocity.
By turns humorous and melancholy, this novel
cruises to a conclusion where all its characters satisfyingly reap what
they have sown. Gerald Duff is a splendid writer of sparkling dialogue,
and has perfect pitch for the ennui of contemporary life in the suburbs
of the petroleum-chemical corridor that stretches along the Gulf Coast
of Texas to Mississippi.
about the author
Gerald Duff's eleven books of
poetry, fiction, and commentary have been variously nominated for the
PEN Faulkner Prize, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the International
eBook Award. A native Texan, he is the Academic Dean at McKendree
College in Lebanon, Illinois. Coasters is his sixth novel. |
