ROUND ROCK
In a small town among the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley, so the locals claim, nothing ever goes according to plan. "It's a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it's just like life, only different."
Red Ray, an alcoholic lawyer, bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion for his wife to remodel and shortly finds himself divorced, sober, and running the place as a drunk farm. Libby Daw and her architect husband moved to the valley to build their dream house; within months, Libby is alone in a trailer on their property with no funds to build. And then, there's Lewis Fletcher, a hard-partying, sometime graduate student who by sheer good luck finds himself in Red Ray's halfway house, Round Rock. These three and some of the locals—including a citrus-growing heiress and a young curandero—find their destinies intertwined as they struggle to find love and community in the homes they never chose.
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Praise for Round Rock
“Huneven is an audacious novelist, casting the narrative light evenly on various idiosyncratic characters while summoning the generationally and culturally distinct voices of a diverse population. She forfeits fashionable audience-protagonist cathexis for a more complex portrayal of multiple situations and relationships, thereby introducing readers to this tight, fractious community as if they were newcomers, free to form their own fresh allegiances. Round Rock is a textured drama of individual and cultural history, a promising debut from a writer of moral nerve, sharp wit and uncommon generosity.”
“Like that other West Coast chronicler of struggling Americans, Raymond Carver, she’s determined to tell the story straight. She is not interested in literary pretension or postmodern razzle-dazzle, but in achieving a measure of truth—and her generous, engaging novel does just that.”
“The small California town of Rito, situated in the San Bernita Valley, is the kind of place that attracts dreamers, like the early settlers who made fortunes as citrus farmers. It’s also a place where people seem to wash up after life’s wrecks. . . Huneven’s remarkably confident first novel is strengthened by a strong sense of place and a cast of vivid characters.”