Townie (A Novel): A Novel

Townie takes place in Oldon, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England village that has become the favored residence of the mega-rich, a town whose historic past has been preserved and polished until it gleams with the arrogant intensity of a Colonial theme park.

Alan Lowe inhabits a different Oldon, however, a town that he loved as a boy for the “power and rightness of its countryside. ” Now, in early middle age, he finds himself living on the margins of the changing town, in a camp deep within Oldon Woods, “inelegantly sheltered by a stale, army-surplus sheet, perforated here and there with pinholes and rudely draped into the equivalent of a teepee. ”

Then Alan’s seemingly rootless life converges with that of Arthur Worthy, a member of the recently-arrived elite, whose life “bristles with appointments, trips, activities, possessions, responsibilities, and business urgencies. ” But Arthur lives on the margin, too, as alone and isolated in his mansion as Alan is in his teepee.

They share, as they discover, an unexpected connection, a woman named Anna, “who must be understood as a catalytic force in both of our lives, the intoxicating girl who devolved into the equable woman whose existence served to define our own. ”

Alan abandons his camp in order to temporarily look after Arthur’s mansion and their lives soon become deeply intertwined in an adventure that is ostensibly a business deal but is, more essentially, a search for love and connection with place.

Townie is a picaresque novel of the countryside, funny and skewering about our social and business pretensions, moving and true about our need for roots and authenticity.

© 2015 The Permanent Press (كتاب ): 9781504012416

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