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THE OREGON EXPERIMENT

Keith Scribner

The story of a marriage that gets too involved in the political upheavals of a town.

Naomi and Scanlon Pratt are at the threshold of a new life. Transplants from back East to small-town Oregon, he’ll be a professor at the university-teaching mass movements and domestic radicalism-and she, a professional “nose” who lost her sense of smell, is pregnant with their first child. For Scanlon, all of this is ideal. With ample opportunity for field research, he finds a subject in Clay, a young anarchist who despises him but adores his wife, and also becomes involved with a local secessionist movement—and its sensuous, free-spirited leader. Naomi, while far less enchanted, discovers that Oregon offers a multitude of scents. Her nose has returned-though she isn’t pleased with everything she smells. As they welcome their newborn, their lives become increasingly intertwined with Clay’s, the stakes begin to rise, and they soon must decide exactly where their loyalties lie-before the world Scanlon has been dabbling in threatens to engulf them all. A contemporary civil war between desire and betrayal, rich in crisp, luxuriant detail, The Oregon Experiment explores a minefield of convictions and complications at once political, social, and intimately personal. Scribner received his BA from Vassar College and MFA from the University of Montana. He was awarded Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux Fellowships in Fiction at Stanford University, where he went on to teach in the Creative Writing Program as a Jones Lecturer. He currently lives in Oregon with his wife, the poet Jennifer Richter, and their children. He teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Daily Beast, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Quarterly West, The North Atlantic Review, the San Jose Mercury News, the Baltimore Sun, and the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton) and Sudden Stories: The MAMMOTH Book of Miniscule Fiction. He received both Pushcart and O’Henry Prize Honorable Mentions for his short story, “Paradise in a Cup” (TriQuarterly, #121).

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Book Published 2011-06-01 by Knopf

Comments

"Keith Scribner sets his mesmerizing novel in the fascinating and little known world of Pacific Northwestern secessionists, but it's the emotional lives of his gorgeously imagined characters that prove most anarchic. This is a thrilling, deeply intimate book by a writer at the peak of his craft."

"Keith Scribner turns a wacky and radical fringe of the Northwest into an often comic and always sensuous novel with deft writing and palpable characters, including a woman who may possess the most powerful and discerning nose in American literature. THE OREGON EXPERIMENT is a lively and provocative ride all the way to its enthralling climax."

"Keith Scribner is certainly one of our most gifted and generous writers. In the midst of anarchists, secessionists, violent clashes and desperate plans, he offers uncommon sympathy and grace in a marriage lost then found, an unlikely hero, a world sensuous and rich, and even redemption from what we might fear most that we can't run from who we are, that the past is waiting to ambush us."

"( ) THE OREGON EXPERIMENT has many virtues - Scribner has a sharp eye for the complicated grace and endless capacity for self-delusion among our species ( ) I find myself unable to forget the pale grim anarchist Clay, who secretly just wants to live quietly with his girlfriend and daughter, and build a family to replace his broken one; and I am far more alert to scent than I was when I started the book; and I am sufficiently intrigued by Scribner's storytelling skills to go read his other two novels."

"THE OREGON EXPERIMENT is engrossing, intelligent and canny, a novel fully animated by Keith Scribner's exquisite prose and by a triangle of remarkable characters: the conflicted academic, his wife the professional nose and their anarchist Lamaze coach. It's a great read."

"The Oregon Experiment deposits its reader at flash points both political and personal: in a town boiling with insurrection and a marriage straining under the pressures of hope and fear. Startlingly empathetic, overwhelmingly sensual, it traces the joys and sorrows of belonging to a country, a spouse, and a family, and the explosive risks we run when we contemplate secession from them."

"Scanlon Pratt, an East Coast history professor specializing in radical organizations and movements, finally lands a tenure-track position and moves west with his pregnant wife, Naomi. The bad news is that they land at a small college where the Forestry Department gets the newest building. The only house they can afford nearby is a small linoleum-floored ranch house in the town of Douglas, Ore., "where there are more people in the July Fourth parade than watching because every kid was riding his bike down Lewis and Clark Boulevard."