Waveland [Hardcover]

Frederick Barthelme (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2009

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi's Gulf Coast, mostly retired architect Vaughn Williams, who is beset by the routine but no less troubling difficulties of late midlife, is doing what he can to remain, as he says, “viable.” He scans the channels, reads newspapers and blogs online, Googles practically everything, teaches an occasional class at the local junior college, and worries perhaps overmuch about his late father.
When his ex-wife, Gail, is assaulted by her hot-tempered new boyfriend, she asks him and his landlady/girlfriend, Greta, to move in with her. Perhaps a little too cavalierly, they agree, and complications distinctly Barthelme-esque follow, including manly confrontations with the perp, lamentations of his father’s life and death, casual moonlight drives, gambling for money, adults playing with trains, and the eventual untimely arrival of Vaughn’s annoyingly successful younger brother, followed closely by Vaughn’s ex-wife’s invitation to remarry.
The tattered landscape of the post-hurricane Gulf Coast is the perfect analogue for these catastrophically out-of-order lives, and in this setting the players work into and out of almost all their troubles. In the process, and en route to a satisfying set of resolutions, Barthelme’s acute eye and subtle wit uncover and autopsy an inner landscape of mortality, love, regret, and redemption. The result is his most emotionally resonant work of fiction yet—and a new reason to celebrate him as an American master.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his first novel since PEN/Faulkner finalist Elroy Nights, Barthelme offers a strangely detached exploration of the post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf Coast. One year after the hurricane and a divorce, Vaughn Williams has more or less recovered from the shock of both. Renting a room from a younger woman who was widowed under mysterious circumstances, Vaughn slides into a low-key romance with his landlady. Their cordial yet detached friendship with Vaughn's ex-wife, Gail, is put to the test when Gail asks Vaughn and his girlfriend, Greta, to move in with her after she's assaulted by her new boyfriend. The change of scenery does little to simplify Vaughn's love life, and his strange new role stirs up his guilt surrounding the death of his father and estrangement from his brother. Oddly, though, Vaughn never seems overly concerned about the developments around him; Gail's new beau never emerges as a threat; and Greta does not seem bothered by the living arrangement. There are some beautifully written passages, but Barthelme's reluctance to break his characters' cozy familiarity makes it difficult for readers to engage with Vaughn's apparent struggles. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

In his newest novel of dysfunction and love along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Barthelme, as he did so incisively in Elroy Nights (2003), dissects middle-age malaise. His characters often seem shipwrecked, and in this off-kilter story of death and divorce, they pretty much are after Katrina transforms the modest beachfront town of Waveland into “ten miles of debris.” Barthelme offers stunning descriptions of the hurricane and its aftermath as he tracks unmoored Vaughn, an architect who has lost his passion for buildings and romance after his reliably unpredictable wife ends their marriage. Brooding, funny, and oddly passive, Vaughn has wandered into a companionable relationship with Greta, the prime suspect in her husband’s murder, and a skittish friendship with hair-trigger Eddie, who lost a hand in the first Gulf War. Meanwhile, Vaughn’s widower father endures a cruelly limited existence. In this powerfully atmospheric story of loneliness and risk, Barthelme slyly conceals emotional and philosophical intensity beneath the peculiarity of circumstance, the dazzle of hilarious repartee, and the luster of gorgeous prose. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527292
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527293
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,229,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frederick Barthelme is author of sixteen books including Moon Deluxe, Second Marriage, Tracer, Two Against One, Natural Selection, The Brothers, Painted Desert, and Bob the Gambler. He is an occasional contributor toThe New Yorker and has published in GQ, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, Frank, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, was co-authored with his brother Steven. A retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages, was published by Counterpoint. His novel, Elroy Nights, was published in 2003 by Counterpoint, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award. His new novel, Waveland, is from Doubleday.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WAVELAND delivers, April 19, 2009

By 

Wilhelmina (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Waveland (Hardcover)

There are a couple of previously-mentioned statements to which I feel the need to respond.

One review below mentions that the setting of post-hurricane Katrina is insignificant. I believe the opposite is true, and that the setting is highly significant (not in terms of "meaning too much" but in terms of just being important), seeing as how these characters have already blown up their own lives. The Mississippi Coast, then serves as a perfect place for them to rebuild, both literally and figuratively.

I am unsure how characters can be both too ordinary and too quirky, but I found these characters to be neither. They were interesting, and weird, yes, but thank goodness for that.

Another review says it is "painful" to hear the characters "prattling on" about Ipods and TV like "disaffected young adults." That reviewer seems to be saying to the characters, "Get back into the ricking chair where you belong, old fogies!" More importantly, the characters "prattle on" about a great deal more than Ipods and TV. They prattle about their pasts, about aging, about their families, about love (most of all), about the world around them and where it was and where it's going and where they fit and mostly don't fit. In other words, they prattle on about things much more universal than electronic fads.

Rick Barthelme's writing is spot-on, as usual, and his eye for detail is razor-sharp. WAVELAND made this reader's heart ache for the characters, it made my heart soar during the moments when they brushed away enough weeds to find a glimmer of something lovely here and there, and it made me laugh out loud. Those are my "big three" requirement for a piece of fiction, and WAVELAND delivers.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Imagine "Less Than Zero" for middle-aged, middle-class people..., April 10, 2009

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Waveland (Hardcover)

--Sort of. It's not for me to recommend that you actually buy this book since I got a copy absolutely free. What are they charging for this thing? Twenty, twenty-five bucks? There are very few books worth that much money in my opinion and this isn't one of them--at least I'd never have paid that much for it. That's not to say it's a bad book, it isn't; it's actually a good book, a book well worth reading, interesting, absorbing, original, and, in its own peculiar way, heartfelt. I just don't think its worth more than say five dollars.

Vaughn is a guy of nearly fifty. He's living in a post-Katrina coastal town with a somewhat rough-around-the-edges gal named Greta, who was once a suspect in the murder of her abusive ne'er-do-well husband. They have a housemate, Eddie, a one-armed Gulf War veteran who's a bit on the edgy crackpot side. Vaughn used to be an architect; now he's not much of anything. Since his divorce, he's been drifting through middle age into oblivion. His flaky ex-wife gets herself into some trouble and asks Vaughn to move back in with her until she gets herself straightened out. He can bring along Greta and even Eddie. That gives you some idea of how flaky she is. That Vaughn, Greta, and Eddie accept this absurd offer gives you some idea of the sort of quirky, eccentric, never-to-be met-in-real-life characters they are, too.

Anyway, this damaged and dysfunctional "family" attempt to come to peace with themselves, each other, the world, and the whole big messy enchilada of life. It's all a bit preposterous in a Seinfeldian way but this is fiction, after all, and, like most things, if you don't look at it too closely and pick everything apart, it makes sense in an exaggerated way.

Barthelme has a distinctive style--rather stark, staccato, elliptical. He does that affectless, emotional flatline things familiar to readers of Brett Easton Ellis and his ilk. Sometimes it sounds as if Barthelme's characters are really Ellis's rich brats who'd somehow aged thirty years overnight and taken a huge financial hit during the recession. It can be a little painful to hear Barthelme's middle-aged cast sounding like disaffected young adults, prattling on about TV shows and Ipods and boredom as they too often do in "Waveland." But the despair underneath sounds real enough; that comes through loud and clear.

The end of "Waveland," which refreshingly comes on without a whole lot of pointless padding and dawdling and dancing-in-place as you'll find in most novels today, seems a bit of a non-sequitur. As if Barthelme were determined to heed the advice of someone who said, "Come on Fred, how about giving us a peep of hope this time, some sort of flicker before the abyss at the end of the tunnel?" And so he does to mixed success, I think, about half of it ringing true, the other half not so much.

If you wait a while and get this book used, or even when it comes out in what will still be an overpriced paperback, I think you'd be better served. This here is nothing you need right away, but you might like to get around to it eventually for it's message of quiet stoicism in the face of the disaster areas we make of our lives.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A portrait of survivors, September 1, 2009

By 

T. V. OBrien (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Waveland (Hardcover)

Other reviewers have already noted the key character descriptions and plot elements, so I won't spend time on those in this review. What struck me most about this book are two things: Barthelme's beautiful prose, so finely crafted that the words themselves--not the simple desire to find out what happens next--propel the reader onwards; and the author's perfect grasp and rendering of what it feels like to be a survivor of life. Through the eyes of the main character Vaughn we see what life is like for someone who tried (but not quite hard enough) at being a husband, being an architect, and being a good son and brother, and who now has to deal with the damage of not having tried hard enough. Barthelme expertly weaves descriptions of post-Katrina Gulf Coast "scenery" into Vaughn's ruminations about his father's death, his failed marriage, and his current state of trying to take things easy. No reader who has experienced a difficult time could fail to be moved by the scene in the Target parking lot, in which Vaughn realizes that sitting alone in his car is the best time he has had in days. Very little happens, in terms of plot points, but everything that is needed happens to Vaughn in this book. I would say that reading it is like therapy, except that doesn't do it justice. Barthelme successfully creates a portrait of a modern-day survivor (and the other survivors in his life) that resonates with the reader. I can't think of many better ways to spend twenty-five dollars.