FIREWORKS
ABOUT
Hollis Clayton is in trouble. His wife has decamped to her sister’s house for the summer, leaving him to pursue without interruption his increasingly overwhelming compulsions: drinking; spying on the neighbors; following with rising anxiety the fate of a recently abducted local girl, hauntingly portrayed on a nearby billboard; confronting, as obliquely as possible, the loss of his young son; and avoiding his editor at New York’s preeminent publishing house, who is on the verge of rejecting his new collection of stories. In the meantime, he has more immediate difficulties: a stray dog with whom he is forced to share his nightly Mexican takeout; a back injury resulting from an adventure on his neighbor’s trampoline; and his girlfriend, Marissa, who has either abandoned him or been abandoned by him, he’s not sure which.
From the vantage point of his front porch, it seems to Hollis that the daily rhythms of his disintegrating life have begun to seem eerily inflected with meaning. Bewildered by what is either life’s total arbitrariness or its suffocating overdetermination, Hollis is stuck somewhere between wonder and paralysis, with his troubled soul hanging in the balance. Before the close of this strange summer he will either slip beyond hope of recovery into a haze of lassitude and alcoholism, or find some promise, however vague, of redemption.
In an eviscerating comic portrait of suburban despair, Elizabeth Winthrop captures the mysterious seasons of a man’s inner and outer life—marriage, grief, existential confusion, and finally, unforgettably, abiding love—and the human spirit’s insistent and sometimes incongruous motion toward grace. A marvelous debut by a precocious new talent.
Knopf
BUY
Paperback: 304 Pages
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN-10: 1-4000-9697-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-9697-8
PRAISE for “FIREWORKS”:
“As full of hilarious missteps as it is poignantly sad. Winthrop proves to be a bitingly intelligent writer.”
“Fireworks... reads like a heartfelt collision of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and the Oscar-winning American Beauty... Pitch-perfect first-person narration.”
“Brimming with gentle wisdom.”
“Hollis keeps me on the edge of my seat. He’s not like any character I’ve met: he navigates the narrowest channel between delusion and self-awareness. Elizabeth Winthrop has made him just barely able to function in a world that bewilders him and is bewildered by him, and she does this always along the boundary between the quotidian and the extraordinary, between an ordinariness of perception that any reader should be able to connect with and the most surprising nuttiness. He breaks my heart.”
““Fireworks is a lovely, touching novel: intelligent, wry, at once lush and spare, perfectly modulated, with a sense of humor so dry you could scrape yourself on it. It is written with uncanny self-assurance, and the author’s evident affection for the book’s cranky hero makes for a narrative that is both kind and wise. A debut novel such as this renews one’s hopes for modern fiction.”