Modern Ranch Living

I have not laughed at anything written by a contemporary writer since George Saunders's story WINKY. Luckily, my sister gifted Modern Ranch Living to me, and I spent the last weekend with Mr. Poirier's book, laughing over and over. Even the most cynical taste out there will appreciate the humor here. Better than anything in McSweeney's, by the way.

I read this little gem of a book on the subway to and from work, and I actually found myself looking forward to filing down into the decrepit Spring Street Station twice a day to crack it open. The lean, dead-pan prose and pop-culture verite style only highlighted some really wonderful moments of quiet pathos and vernacular wisdom. You can practically feel the heat of the Tuscon desert, by dint of its incessant, insistent sameness, slowly forcing the book's two main characters to emerge from the stupor of their plastic, suburban lives and finally feel something other than selfish desire. There's life in the red-state housing developments of our TV-numbed country, and Poirier is one of its sharpest, most patient observers.

Poirier's latest book returns to the Tuscon setting of his excellent previous novel, Goats, to meander through a long, hot summer in the lives of two somewhat strange neighbors in a suburban gated community. Kendra Lumm is a fitness-obsessed teenager, spending hours every day running, swimming, weightlifting, and eating right. Aside from her body, her main concerns are her genius/nerd older brother, her anger management therapy sessions, her strange (and hilarious) verbal syntax, and the mysterious disappearance of the boy down the street who kinda-sorta-not really used to be her boyfriend. Also down the street lives Merv Hunter, a 30 year old water park manager who shares his insomniac mother's home. He's the only one of his prep school friends who never went on to college, and although he's very good at his job and likes it, feels the stigma of never having left home and gone on to bigger and better things. Over the course of the summer, both will meet new people, learn things about themselves, and ultimately grow and mature. There's not much of a plot, per se, rather the book drifts along like the summer, as the reader gets drawn into Kendra and Merv's routine. Hovering the background, and occasionally stepping forward, is the plotline revolving around the the missing boy. A renown huffer of magic markers, he'd last been seen hanging out with some seedy, BMX-riding tweakers (methamphetamine addicts) who also happen to hang out around Merv's water park. However, for the most part, the book just meanders through the summer. Kendra grudgingly goes to her therapy sessions, attends a summer class where she makes a good friend, ponders her brother's sexual orientation, and heaps scorn upon his loser girlfriend. Merv attends to the daily routine at the park (including helping out a rich wheelchair-bound patron who has a debilitating muscular disease), and worries about his mother. A trip up to Phoenix to hang out with his old high school buddies (now pudgy cubicle-bound ex-dot commers) leads to a woman entering his life, and the possibility of a new relationship. There a great deal to enjoy here, from little details about Kendra (for example, like other fitness compulsives, her first evaluation of a person is based of muscle definition and tone), to the way the desert heat comes alive. Characters are constantly in and out of pools, flipping air-conditioning on, and always in search of something to drink. The supporting cast is universally vivid, from the water park's ex-jock security squad, to Kendra's ex-punk parents turned vintage toy seller and golf pro. Interestingly, virtually every adult in the book has some kind of character flaw or problem, and there's a distinctly satirical aspect to anyone who has lots of book learning (examples include a poetry professor, and Harvard Business School grad, and Kendra's therapist). It's all part of Poirier has a skeptical take on traditional authority figures as well as the utility of dominant mass cultura

I couldn't put this one down. Amazing, sneaky work by Poirier here. He makes you laugh, but he also hooks you with a bit of a mystery. The two main characters, Kendra and Merv, are so wonderfully rendered I felt as if I was saying goodbye to two good (although weird) friends when I turned the final page. Not sure if that Kelly person from the Bay Area read the same novel. Solopsistic and sexist? Um, no. Not even vaguely so.

This is Poirier's warmest and most compassionate work to date. He hasn't sacrificed any of the sharp-edged dialogue that's often spit-out-your-drink funny, but he has written a book that is ultimately about two characters changing in the small, incremental ways in which real people change. I thought it was smart and honest and psychologically true. No shiny-happy big-bang fake epiphanies here -- instead, we get the little experiences that gradually accrete and in the end push Kendra and Merv forward into more fully-realized adulthood. The best part is, these changes don't always come with the characters' complicity, or even their full recognition--which, again, feels psychologically true to me. I think it's a hell of a book, and it works on levels far subtler than some reviewers seem to recognize. Plussing as which, it's spit-out-your-drink-funny, too.