Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
	List Price:   $16.00 Unit Price:   $12.80 You Save:   $3.20 (20%) ISBN-10:   0375727647 ISBN-13:   9780375727641 Publisher:   Random House [MD]; Vintage Series:   Vintage Contemporaries Ser. Category:   Young Adults Pub. Date:   January 2002 Pages:   320 Format:   Paperback
Subjects
ARIZONA_FICTION FICTION_HUMOROUS FRIENDSHIP_FICTION
Description/Notes
The winter had not brought rain and there were no flowers, there would be no flowers. Still, the land in the spring of the year when Alice would turn sixteen could not be said to be suffering from drought. The desert knew no drought, really. Anything so habitual and prolonged was simply life--a life invisible and anticipatory. What was germinative would only remain so that spring. What was possible was neither dead nor alive. Relief had been promised, of course. ???????? For more than a month now, after school, Alice had been caring for six-year-old fraternal twins, Jimmy and Jacky. They lived with their mother, who was away all day, cutting hair. Their father was off in another state, building submarines. Hair, submarines, it was disgusting, Alice thought. She did not find the children at all interesting. They cried frequently, indulged themselves in boring, interminable narratives, were sentimental and cruel, and when frustrated would bite. They had a pet rabbit that Alice feared for. She made them stop giving it baths all the time and tried to interest them in giving themselves baths, although in this she was not successful. She assisted them with special projects for school. It was never too early for investigative reporting. They should not be dissuaded by their teacher's discomfort; to discomfort teachers was one's duty. They were not too young to be informed about the evils of farm subsidies, monoculture, and overproduction. They should know, if only vaguely at first, about slaughterhouses. They shouldn't try to learn everything at once--they'd probably get discouraged--but they should know how things come into being, like ponies, say, and how they're taken out of being and made into handbags and coats. They should get a petition going to stop the lighting of athletic fields, since too much light obliterated the night sky. Excessive light was bad. On the other hand, some things perceived as bad were good. Wasps, for instance. They should not destroy the wasp nest they discovered in their garage with poisons because wasp-nest building was fun to watch in a time-lapse photography sort of way. They should marvel at the wasps' architectural abilities, their insect awareness of a supreme future structure they alone were capable of creating. Wasps were cool. The queens knew how to subsist in a state of cryogenic preservation in the wintertime. Jimmy and Jacky could get special credit for their understanding of wasps, agribusiness, slaughterhouses--just to name a few possibilities.She was willing to make learning interesting for them. ???????? But she didn't help much with homework. Mostly the three of them just hung out. Little kids didn't instinctively know how to hang out, Alice was surprised to learn. Sometimes they'd walk down to the Goodwill store and see the kind of stuff people had wanted once but didn't want anymore. She usually didn't buy anything because she didn't believe in consumption, but once she bought a nun in a snow dome. The nun was only fifty cents because the snow had turned brown and clotted and fell in revolting clumps when you turned the thing upside down. What was a nun doing in one of those snow domes anyway? Alice had never seen anything like it. The twins had never seen anything like it either. But Goodwill was only good for once or twice a week. The rest of the time they'd sit around in these tiny plastic chairs the boys had in their junk-filled room and Alice would discuss things with them, chiefly environmental concerns. Alice liked talking about animals and excess packaging. She opened their small eyes to the world of drift nets, wetland mitigation, predator control, and overpopulation. She urged them to discuss the overpopulation problem with their mother. Sometimes their attention wandered. They had a bunk bed in their room, and they both Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old–the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles–and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity. “Poetic, disturbing yet very funny…the brilliantly controlled style [is] informed by a powerful spiritual vision.”–The Washington Post Book World “Joy Williams has produced a hard, sharp, comic novel about the off-kilter genius of adolescence–a work of maverick insight and rash and beautiful bursts of language.”–Don DeLillo “Fierce, lively, and shocking…. Possesses a tooth and claw beauty as dangerous and brilliant as a cougar on the move.”–The Boston Globe “An intelligent, unsettling, audacious, virtuosic, improbable novel.” –The New York Times Book Review “So strange and so good . . . so frightening and so comic . . . every single element in it is undomesticated, from the characters to the clauses.” –Voice Literary Supplement Possessing a 'tooth and claw beauty' ('The Boston Globe'), this comic novel is a masterpiece of American life as seen through the looking glass of adolescence. Over summer vacation in the Arizona desert, three girls explore a world seemingly empty of meaning yet filled with eccentricity and random events. A 'New York Times' Notable Book. Copyright ? Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.