Verwandte Artikel zu The Realm of Last Chances

9780385349505: The Realm of Last Chances
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385349505 ISBN 13: 9780385349505
Verlag: KNOPF, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In a captivating departure from the Deep South setting of his previous fiction, Steve Yarbrough now gives us a richly nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in a small town in the Northeast, in his most surprising and compelling novel yet.

When Kristin Stevens loses her administrative job in California’s university system, she and her husband, Cal, relocate to Massachusetts. Kristin takes a position at a smaller, less prestigious college outside Boston and promptly becomes entangled in its delicate, overheated politics. Cal, whose musical talent is nothing more than a consuming avocation, spends his days alone, fixing up their new home. And as they settle into their early fifties, the two seem to exist in separate spheres entirely. At the same time, their younger neighbor Matt Drinnan watches his ex-wife take up with another man in his hometown, with only himself to blame. He and Kristin, both facing an acute sense of isolation, gravitate toward each other, at first in hope of a platonic confidant but then, inevitably, of something more. The Realm of Last Chances provides us with a subtle, moving exploration of relationships, loneliness and our convoluted attempts to reach out to one another.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Born in Indianola, Mississippi, Steve Yarbrough is the author of five previous novels and three collections of stories. A PEN/Faulkner finalist, he has received the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and another prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts.

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They were both fifty when they moved to Massachusetts, settling in a small town a few miles north of Boston. Like a lot of people around the country over the last few years, they’d recently experienced a run of bad luck.
 
Due to the state budget crisis, she’d lost her job as vice president for academic personnel at a large University of California campus in the Sacramento Valley. The year before her layoff, everyone, even the football coaches, had been subjected to mandatory furloughs, and things had turned ugly as the union blamed the shortfall on “managerial bloat.” She’d had a hand in denying tenure to a number of professors, and many faculty members rejoiced when the administration was reorganized and she received her pink slip.
 
His business was construction. He was the man you engaged if you needed to have something small and delicate done and could pay for fine work. You had to accept certain things about him, though. He’d come and go on his own terms, and he would bring a small Bose along and listen to music through- out the day. He wouldn’t have much to say. The fact that he was working for you didn’t necessarily mean he’d return every phone call. People who’d put up with such idiosyncrasies when the economy was healthy proved a lot less understanding after the downturn. By the time they left the valley, he hadn’t had a job for close to six months.
 
Her friends had always considered them an odd pair. He was from someplace down around Bakersfield, a tall, angular man who’d attended college only a semester before dropping out. His great passion was stringed instruments, and he could play the guitar, mandolin, banjo and Dobro well enough to earn money doing it if he’d chosen to, but the only audience he ever performed for was the other amateur musicians and assorted hangers-on who gathered at a crossroads grocery out- side Sacramento on Friday nights. That was where they’d met, when she went there with a friend a year or so after the demise of her first marriage.
 
Of medium height, trim and fit, she’d earned a Ph.D. in comp lit and published a handful of articles on writers like Kafka, Broch and Svevo before moving into administration. With a laugh, she sometimes referred to her days in the class- room as “my previous life.” She didn’t think she’d been a very good teacher, perhaps because she had trouble reaching out to those she taught, who were often first-generation college students from migrant families. She loved cooking and sometimes wondered if she’d missed her calling and should’ve owned a restaurant.
 
She had what she always described as bad hair. Blond, it had always been thin, and as she aged it grew even thinner. The valley’s arid climate didn’t help. When she attended a conference in the Deep South or went back home to Pennsylvania, the moisture in the air lent it a bit more body. But it is what it is, she liked to say. She’d watched a couple middle-aged women—friends of her mother—quietly go crazy in the small town where she’d grown up, doing all sorts of bizarre things that caused others pain and kept the local gossips entertained, and she’d promised herself that when her time came to grow older she would accept it with grace.
 
Moving to Massachusetts was itself an act of acceptance. She got another job in academic personnel, this time at a state college, where she’d earn barely half her former salary, and they sold their house in the valley for barely half of what it had once been worth and bought a three-story colonial that needed lots of work. They wouldn’t hire anyone to fix it up. Cal could do whatever needed doing to any house, anywhere.
 
The couple owned a dog, a ten-year-old black Lab named Suzy that they’d given themselves for their fifth anniversary. The first evening in the new house, with most of their things still in Bekins cartons, they decided to take her out for a walk. She’d had a rough trip across the country, mostly riding in the cab of Cal’s pickup, though a few times they switched and let her get in the car with Kristin.
 
It was August and hotter than either of them had expected. “This feels like New Orleans,” she said as they stepped off the porch. “I don’t know if we can make it here without AC.”
 
He gestured at the house directly across the street, where a pair of window units droned on the second floor. “I’ll go look for one of those as soon as we get unpacked. We can put it in the bedroom. From what I read online, the most we’ll ever get’s three or four weeks of heat and humidity. Some years even less.”
 
The neighborhood, according to the Realtor who’d helped them find the house, was a good one, on the dividing line between two distinctly different North Shore towns. The one to the east, Cedar Park, was a little more upscale, with a fine seafood restaurant and a Mexican place the lady claimed would pass muster even with Californians. It also had a bakery where you could buy real Irish soda bread, a couple of nice cafés, several antique stores and an antiquarian bookshop. They never bothered to remove the Christmas lights on Main Street, she told them, so even a balmy summer night seemed to hint of nutmeg and cider, and you almost expected to hear sleigh bells. An early Temperance Movement stronghold, it was still legally dry, though you could get a drink in both restaurants, pro- vided you first ordered food. Montvale—the town to the west in which they technically resided, though its center was farther away—had a grittier, blue-collar air. According to Wikipedia, back in the seventies it had earned an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of gas stations in a one-mile stretch. Most of those were gone now, apparently displaced by liquor stores: the day they made the offer on the house, Cal had counted seven. Chains like CVS, Walgreens, Stop & Shop and Shaw’s were driving out the mom-and-pops, but he’d noted two independent hardware stores within a few hundred yards of each other. He hoped to scope them out over the next few days.
 
“A lot of things seem strange here,” she said as they turned down the sidewalk.
 
“Like what?”
 
She nodded at the house they were passing. Like almost all the other Victorians and colonials in the neighborhood, it must have been built well over a hundred years ago. Through the window she could see a couple sitting there watching TV.
 
 Dropping her voice, she said, “Their car has an Obama sticker on it.”
 
“Well, it’s Massachusetts.”
 
“But they’re watching Bill O’Reilly, and that means Fox News.”
 
“Maybe they’re disillusioned. Aren’t you?”
 
She knew how he voted—the same ticket she did—but sometimes didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. He was prone to silence. It was a matter of aesthetics, she supposed, like his disdain for musicians who played too many notes. “Not with Obama,” she answered.
 
He laughed. “With me?”
 
“Not you, either,” she said, refusing to consider whether she was telling the whole truth.
 
He jiggled Suzy’s chain. “Guess that means it’s you, pooch.”
 
They walked around the neighborhood for thirty or forty minutes, both of them wearing shorts and T-shirts, and in no time his were soaked. He’d always perspired a lot, but unlike her he...

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Verlag
KNOPF
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385349505
ISBN 13 
9780385349505
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
271
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland