Fireworks

Hollis Clayton is in trouble. His wife has decamped to her sister’s house for the summer, leaving him to pursue without interruption his increasingly overwhelming compulsions: drinking; spying on the neighbours; following with rising anxiety the fate of a recently abducted local girl; confronting, as obliquely as possible, the loss of his young son; and avoiding his editor at New York’s pre-eminent publishing house, who is on the verge of rejecting his new collection of stories. In the meantime, he has more immediate difficulties: a stray dog with whom he is forced to share his Mexican takeout; a back injury resulting from a midnight adventure on his neighbour’s trampoline; and his girlfriend, Marissa, who has either abandoned him or been abandoned by him, he’s not sure which. Here, in the daily rhythms of Hollis’s disintegrating life, is an eviscerating comic portrait of suburban despair, and a deeply affecting tale of grief and renewal. Hollis Clayton—caught in a hilarious, paralysing struggle between the world’s dizzying randomness and its suffocating overdetermination—is a marvellous creation.