Round Rock by Michelle Huneven

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Among the inhabitants of the Santa Bernita Valley, it is commonly believed that nothing there ever goes according to plan." Some of the inhabitants swear that not even gravity is fully in control: Minor earthquakes ripple through the valley, and in certain places idling cars and irrigation ditches both display the astonishing ability to run uphill. Little wonder then, "that humans, being ninety percent water, should also fall prey to certain reversals and unpredictabilities."

Debut novelist Michelle Huneven sets her story in the sleepy town of Rito, a sort of quirky southern California Mitford, complete with its own resident spiritual advisor, a nominally domesticated dog of unusual size and questionable parentage, and an endearing cast of supporting characters. But coincidental comparisons to Jan Karon's homely hamlet end there — this is multiculti southern California after all, not the mountains of North Carolina. For better and for worse, a different philosophy — and a completely different set of temptations — apply.

In a valiant attempt to quit drinking and save his marriage, San Francisco lawyer Red Ray drops out of the rat race, puts a down payment on the old Morrot ranch — a dilapidated mansion presiding over 750 acres of neglected citrus groves — and hangs out his shingle in a storefront on Rito's main drag. But his sobriety cannot keep pace with work on the house, and Red Ray watches helplessly as his wife and young son drive away, leaving him to rattle about his half-restored Victorian whimsy alone.Hecelebrates his abandonment with a final, legendary "drinking tour of the Southland" with his old buddy Frank Jamieson, a spree that leaves Frank speechless, witless, and barely ambulatory, and propels Red Ray, after months of physical therapy, into AA. Sober for the first time in years, Red Ray decides to turn his half-renovated mansion into a "kind of halfway house for drunks and addicts," and after hiring staff and scouring every jail, hospital, and detox center in a 50-mile radius for "guests," the Round Rock Farm for Recovering Alcoholics opens for business.

Some years later, Lewis Fletcher arrives at Round Rock after his own final, fateful binge. A graduate student who has taken the last two quarters off to finish a string of incompletes (with overdue papers such as "Flaubert and Racism in Late Nineteenth-Century France," "Inscape and Individuation: Concepts of Self in Hopkins and Jung," it's no wonder he drinks), Lewis at first protests that his drinking isn't really all that out of control. He tries to impress Red Ray with his scholarly shtick, offering to write brochure copy in return for time on his computer. But to his puzzlement, Ray asks him only for a precis of his drinking history. Unsurprisingly, Lewis's essay is a doozie, alternately hilarious and harrowing, complete with a chronicle of psychedelic drug use that calls to mind feverish episodes of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky. At last twigging to the possibility that he may just have a problem, Lewis surrenders to Red Ray's sponsorship.

Lewis not only survives his court-ordered stay at Round Rock but decides to stay on in Rito, accepting a job as Red Ray's secretary. Making order from someone else's chaos is a pleasant change, and besides, he has struck up a rather steamy relationship with another Rito refugee, Libby Daw. Discarded when her architect husband began to chase after a Burbank actress, Libby now lives in an antique Manatee trailer on the plot of land where they had planned to build their — his — glass and chrome dreamhome. Neither Libby nor Lewis is prepared for the consequences of their affair; but as long as no real emotional demands are made, they maintain a mutually acceptable level of passion. Predictably, Lewis fails her when Libby needs him most, leaving her once again jilted and homeless. Into this slough of despond steps Red Ray — martyr, saint, and bodhisattva all in one — climbing down from his bare tree and at long last accepting the burden and joys of his own humanity.

Humanity is what Round Rock is all about. Huneven's characters may not always act in their own best interests, but they do behave with an honesty that makes even their most bizarre exploits believable. No one is stinted for personal history or carelessly drawn — even the least among Rito's residents seems to come to the page with a vivid story to tell. Huneven is a particularly keen observer of men: Libby's unsparing journal entries portray Lewis, and later, Red Ray, with jaw-dropping candor, and in revealing their ulterior motives, prevarications, insecurities, and sexual neediness she holds up a mirror in which more than a few of us will recognize our own reflections. At once a vivid evocation of landscape and community and a brilliant exploration of the dynamics of addiction and recovery, Round Rock is an utterly magical novel, an alchemical transformation of the base metal of human experience into an alloy of purest soul.

From the Publisher

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."

Certainly a number of Rito's inhabitants--fewer than a hundred in all--are surprised to be living here. Red Ray, for instance, a wildly alcoholic lawyer who bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an attempt to rehabilitate his marriage and regain the affections of his wife and young son. After destroying those hopes with a spectacular final binge, Red established a drunk farm, Round Rock, on the ruins. There, one day at a time, he follows his new, unexpected calling.

Many months after her husband decamped (almost immediately) for Los Angeles, Libby Daw still lives alone in their trailer, and finds herself even more rooted to the valley she dreams of escaping.

And there's Lewis Fletcher, a sometime graduate student whose keen intelligence is sorely tested by his erratic behavior and current predicament. Without exactly knowing why, and entirely against his wishes--or by default and sheer good luck--he finds himself placed in Ray's care at Round Rock.

As these people seek out or maintain their various niches in the valley, the peculiar history of the place asserts itself. An heiress descended from the original settlers, Billie Fitzgerald still acts as though she owns it all; devoted to her father and son, she obscures her mercurial emotions from even her closest friends. The past also returns with David Ibañez, whose family had harvested the groves for generations--and whose talents and secrets (and thus, hediscovers, his future) are inextricably bound to the complex, close-knit town he thought he had left behind.

With insight matched with artistry, Michelle Huneven traces the emerging destinies of these characters as each of them struggles for peace and equilibrium, even happiness and love, against hapless, all-too-human frailty and circumstance.

A vivid evocation of landscape and community, Round Rock derives great power from psychological subtlety, and from affection for and profound understanding of lives strained or broken but on the mend. Fresh, remarkably mature, and constantly surprising, this astonishing debut wins both your trust and your heart.


From the Hardcover edition.

Valerie Sayers

[An] immensely likeable first novel. -- NY Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

"Among the inhabitants of the Santa Bernita Valley, it is commonly believed that nothing there ever goes according to plan."

So begins this delightful, bittersweet first novel about three of the central California Valley's hapless inhabitants and the lives they make by accident together. Ex-lawyer and recovering alcoholic Red Ray runs a halfway house for ex-boozers a few miles outside the little town of Rito, in the Valley's rural eastern end; abandoned by her hotshot architect husband, ex-housewife Libby Daw moves into a trailer and makes ends meet working for the local AA chapter; blacked-out ex-grad student Lewis Fletcher wakes up one morning far from home, in the Ventura County detox center and, with one too many alcohol-related offenses against his name, finds himself an unwilling prisoner of Round Rock, Red's drunk farm.

With a gentle hand reminiscent of Annie Proulx or Anne Tyler, Huneven brings these three lonely exes together in a bumbling triangle of affections that is at once unmistakably contemporary and familiar, attentive (if not always obedient) to the conventions of literary melodrama. As in most good comic novels, tear-jerkers included, the question "Who will end up with whom?" shades imperceptibly into the more interesting question "How?" Huneven has a gift for rendering grownup characters who keep growing up credibly (and quickly) before our eyes. There is nothing outwardly dazzling in her methodno breathtaking prose or startling wit, no perfectly tidy twisting to the plot, just a deep, intelligent sympathy for people whose lives matter to the reader. That is the quiet triumph of this novel, and for that, it stands out as one of the season's more promising debuts.

Kirkus Reviews

Huneven appears on the scene with a California-set and deftly managed melodrama about life, love—and alcoholism.

Red Ray was a thriving West Coast lawyer with a glamorous and ambitious wife—until she dumped him for being a drunk, and until he himself ended up nearly dead, thrown from a car wreck during a booze-driven tour of the southwest. "Red Ray," says Huneven, "rose from that curb a sober man." Where to go? What to do? Red returns to the half-decrepit Victorian mansion in the Santa Bernita Valley that he'd bought earlier as a gift and hobby for his renovation-minded wife and transforms it into—a "drunk farm." The mansion itself was once the home of a rich and cultivated woman who was also owner of the surrounding citrus groves—and whose Mexican workers lived in small sturdy bungalows clustered near the groves. The hardworking but laid-back Red makes a great success of it, filling the mansion with recovering drunks, becoming well known, receiving grants, and earning the lifelong fidelity and affection of the men he cures. Huneven's story begins when Red takes on a graduate student in his 20s named Lewis Fletcher, who's in denial not only about his alcoholism but about his own destructive and immature temperament. As the long tale unravels in its leisurely way (the as-yet unspoiled valley, famous for its "round rocks," is almost as much a character as the people in it), Lewis slowly gets cured—and slowly grows up—but there will be complications even so, partly from his love affair with the divorced Libby Pollack Daw and its unhappy aftermath, partly from his dealings with the treacherous local beauty, Billie Fitzgerald, partly from an old, deeply buriedmystery, and partly from what happens to the beloved Red Ray.

Long, slow, intelligent, and humane (not to mention filled with high expertise about alcoholism), Huneven's first offers an honest and compelling allure.

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt