The Suburbs of Heaven - Hardcover

Drown, Merle

3.44

39 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471827 ISBN 13: 9781569471821

Publisher: Soho Pr Inc, 2000

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With his lovely wife being paid to dance nude for his wealthy brotherinlaw, his son embarked on a life of drugs, and his daughter a prostitute, life has pushed Jim, a New Hampshire trailer park inhabitant, to the absolute edge.

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Review:

"If I could get Pauline to see daylight, get my kids settled, and pay off my debts, why, we could be living in the suburbs of heaven," Jim Hutchins thinks in a uncharacteristically optimistic moment from Merle Drown's second novel. But he isn't getting anywhere near heaven anytime soon--not even its suburbs, not even its commercial strip. Considering the many obstacles standing between Jim and heaven (the tax man after him, his wife Pauline mired in grief over their drowned daughter, another daughter turning tricks for booze money, one son in and out of jail and the other son thinking a snake has hatched in his head), he might as well be writing postcards from the fiery pit. What's more, while Jim suspects his brother-in-law Emory Holler has murdered his sister, he knows his wife Pauline has been dancing in her altogether for Emory. Finally, there's a panty thief terrorizing their rural New Hampshire town, and somehow, you just know he's going to make an appearance before the novel's end.

All things considered, Jim Hutchins is a kind of Down East Job, though he wastes little time picking scabs or cursing God. Jim's a man of action, not reflection, and so the book begins with a shotgun and ends with an inferno, with comedy and tragedy battling it out in the pages between. What keeps all this from turning into an episode of Jerry Springer is Drown's black, biting wit and his prose, which like the characters themselves is both colorful and coiled tight as a spring. (The police stick to Tommy Hutchins like "straw to a sweaty neck"; Jim gets mad but stays "sober as a cold chisel.") If the concluding reversal comes about a trifle suddenly, well, there are greater crimes in this world--crimes that one of the Hutchins clan is sure to commit if you just give them a chance. --Mary Park

From the Back Cover:

"Antic, tender, and bittersweet...Narrated in the convincing voices of the five Hutchinses, the story veers from ribald to tragic...Throughout, Drown's language shines, and even his most misguided characters are fully alive, resonant, and original, speaking with quiet, piercing wisdom." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Energetic plotting...Ironically, it is the comedy that gives [the characters] stature and even dignity, as they pick themselves up after each new mortification." The New York Times Book Review.

"This powerful and disturbing novel chronicles the hardscrabble lives of the Hutchins clan and their colorful, compelling neighbors. Here's a tale of betrayal and loss, ignorance and poverty. Merle Drown knows that what's important is the exploration of the human heart in conflict with itself." John Dufrense, author of Love Warps the Mind a Little.

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