Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

CAROUSEL COURT

Joe McGinniss

Joe McGinniss Jr. returns with Carousel Court: a bold, original, and exhilarating novel of marriage as blood sport that reads like Revolutionary Road for the era of The Unwinding.

Nick and Phoebe Maguire are a young couple with big dreams who move across the country to Southern California in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son following a devastating trauma. But they move at the worst possible time, into an economic crisis that spares few. Instead of landing in a beachside property, strolling the organic food aisles, and selecting private preschools, Nick and Phoebe find themselves living in the dark heart of foreclosure alley, surrounded by neighbors being drowned by their underwater homes who set fire to their belongings, flee in the dead of night, and eye one another with suspicion while keeping twelve-gauge shotguns by their beds. Trapped, broke, and increasingly desperate, Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond. Hatched under one roof, their two separate, secret agendas will collide in spectacular fashion.

A blistering and unforgettable vision of the way we live now, Carousel Court paints a darkly honest portrait of modern marriage while also capturing the middle-class America of vanished jobs, abandoned homes, psychotropic cure-alls, infidelity via iPhone, and ruthless choices. As bestselling author Walter Kirn says, “This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I’ve read in years.”

Joe McGinniss Jr. is a throwback to the days of brash and stylish voices like Bret Easton Ellis and Joan Didion—his first novel was compared to both. His new book is fast, frightening, sexy, and ultimately life affirming. It is a darkly honest vision of modern marriage that will make you wonder what your spouse/partner is really up to on that iPhone or iPad across the living room.

Available products
Book Published 2016-08-02 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2016-08-02 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Carousel Court showcases a domestic circus of the most compelling kind: a kaleidoscopic train-wreck of a marriage set ablaze by the bright white hyperreality of a California suburb in decline. Joe McGinniss Jr. writes with wit and scorching honesty about adultery, addiction, and financial ruin, never losing sight of his characters’ humanity and their fractured hope that redemption might be possible after all.

Here it is, the leveraged, frayed, unfaithful, buzzed America that all the baloney entertainment products, including a lot that pose as literature, are designed to cover up. Can you handle the truth? Then step inside. This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I’ve read in years.

[A] novel of unrelenting tension. … Doomed and doughty, [Phoebe’s] a lexicon of contradictions, a kind of update on Maria Wyeth of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. McGinniss also recalls Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust in depicting their road, Carousel Court, as a catalog of strangeness and dangers: from coyotes and marauding home invaders to weird neighbors and crying, screaming cicadas. McGinniss covers familiar territory in the marketplace and marriage but injects it with an urgency, a sense of constant, inescapable threat that all adds up to a taut page-turner. Read more...

CAROUSEL COURT has just been named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize 2016 for Fiction. The winner will be announced on November 3.

CAROUSEL COURT is an August 2016 Indie Next Pick and a “Most Anticipated Books of 2016” selection by The Millions!

Carousel Court pulls no punches, taking on nothing less than marriage, and the false promises of our American Dream. These are great big subjects and Joe McGinniss Jr. is more than up to them. Mature and smart and in control of his arsenal, he writes tenderly about family and parenthood, and is every bit as clear-eyed when the subject is underwater mortgages or secret sexting. The result is a hell of a roller coaster. Strap yourself.

McGinniss writes with a keen feel for the contemporary zeitgeist, but he also might justly lay claim to being the ascending fictional Prince of Darkness.

In urgent, kaleidoscopic prose, Joe McGinniss Jr. diagnoses the American Dream with a high fever, jaundice, and severe heartburn. Set in a simmering suburban Los Angeles, Carousel Court is the portrait of a disastrous but thoroughly modern marriage whose young wife, Phoebe Maguire, is hurtling toward a pill-fueled implosion that’s impossible to look away from. The pitch-perfect ending reverberates like a handbell after a hurricane.

Harrowing, smart, wickedly accurate about the third world of the contemporary United States, and very well written.

A powerful and almost unremittingly bleak novel that may have some readers recalling Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” … Along with Yeats, there are echoes here of Martin Amis’ similarly pre-apocalyptic London Fields.

Propulsive. … The novel’s nearly 100 vignettes—many of them gems of concision and electric prose that lay bare the darker sides of Nick and Phoebe, as well as the handful of coworkers and eccentric neighbors who swirl down the drain with them—mirror the discontent seething just beneath the surface of an ersatz American dream. … McGinniss is at his best when describing, with anthropological intensity, the throes of a broken relationship.