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This Vacant Paradise

By Victoria Patterson

Product Image: This Vacant Paradise

This Vacant Paradise

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Description
The 1990s—Newport Beach, California. Money is God. A man's worth is judged by the size of his boat, the make of his car. A woman's value is assessed by the blank perfection of her quantifiable desirability: dress size, cup size, the whiteness of her teeth. And oh yes: her youth. Though Esther Wilson, the heroine of Victoria Patterson's profound and electric debut novel, has the looks to marry well, things aren't going as planned. She's nearing her mid-30s and possibly aging out of the only role she's equipped to play: wife to a powerful member of the elite. Instead, Esther finds herself drawn to college professor Charlie Murphy, who challenges her and offers an alternative vision—one that he himself might not have the courage to follow. In the tradition of Edith Wharton and Henry James and their great social novels of the turn of the century, This Vacant Paradise recasts the important questions about our very American obsessions: class, caste, race, age, and the roles of men and women in our drive toward an ever more lofty sense of our upward mobility, where even churchgoing is a method of networking. Victoria Patterson, author of the story collection Drift, a Story Prize and California Book Award finalist, gives us a novel of such rigor and complexity that it feels too masterful to be her first. Like ZZ Packer or Robert Stone, Patterson's prose is at once wickedly entertaining and searingly intelligent in its quest to consider whether the myth of American freedom and social mobility might be just that. The world of Esther Wilson is compelling and full of the vapid culture that produces train-wreck reality TV: nothing good will come of this and yet you cannot look away.
Product details
Number of Pages:
309
Release Date:
2011-03-01
Publication Date:
2011-03-31
Publisher:
COUNTERPOINT PR
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1582436452
ISBN13:
9781582436456
Weight:
552 g
Height:
162 cm
Width:
235 cm
Thickness:
30 cm
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