Olympus, Texas: A Novel (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

Swann, Stacey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593414098 ISBN 13: 9780593414095

Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A bighearted novel with technicolor characters, plenty of Texas swagger, and a powder keg of a plot in which marriages struggle, rivalries flare, and secrets explode, all with a clever wink toward classical mythology.

For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe: "The Iliad meets Friday Night Lights in this muscular, captivating debut" (Oprah Daily).

The Briscoe family is once again the talk of their small town when March returns to East Texas two years after he was caught having an affair with his brother's wife. His mother, June, hardly welcomes him back with open arms. Her husband's own past affairs have made her tired of being the long-suffering spouse. Is it, perhaps, time for a change? Within days of March's arrival, someone is dead, marriages are upended, and even the strongest of alliances are shattered. In the end, the ties that hold them together might be exactly what drag them all down.

An expansive tour de force, Olympus, Texas cleverly weaves elements of classical mythology into a thoroughly modern family saga, rich in drama and psychological complexity. After all, at some point, don't we all wonder: What good is this destructive force we call love?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STACEY SWANN holds an MFA from Texas State University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Memorious, Versal, and other journals, and she is a Contributing Editor of American Short Fiction. She is a native Texan.

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one

Drive down in the dark, in the fog--thick white against the headlights and the windshield. The world without form and without shape. Follow the sound of gravel grinding under tires as it slips and shifts. Smooth and quiet means you’re headed into the ditch. Cross over metal pipes, the thump-thump-thump of the cattle guard. Downhill, into the bottomland, the gritty crunch now covered by the bawling of frogs and cicadas. Stop the car. Wait. The sun will rise and burn the land into relief.

When morning comes, the view is a tangle of trees and underbrush--bur oak and cedar elm, pecan and supplejack, poison oak and mustang grape vines. Not a hiking forest but scratchy impenetrability, like a ten-acre fence gapped only by this dirt road. Cow pastures lie somewhere near, in this border between oak savannahs and Gulf prairies, but here is just a small clearing with a large white house guarded by a sextet of cottonwoods. Wind lifts the cotton from the trees, and it snows down on the house: two stories with four large columns careening up the front, broken in the middle by a spindle railing and balcony. Windows peep from the gabled roof. Bermuda grass covers the lawn, interrupted by square flowerbeds lined out with railroad ties--the smell of roses and creosote.

The house is bounded by the woods on one side and the Brazos River, slow moving and brown, on the other. The fluff from a cottonwood lands, rides a mud-saturated current, and then gets sucked under. The rise and fall of the water level has left the clay banks patched with only fast-growing weeds. The river--not Mississippi-wide, but too wide to throw a stone across--generates a steady white noise.

And inside the house? Peter and June in their bed, old and brass, columned like their home. The brass rises like prison bars from the head and the foot of the frame. The bed sat forgotten in his parents’ barn for decades until Peter found it. He was eleven months into dating June, and he jokingly said to her the bed, with its feeling of enclosure, spoke to him of marriage. He dragged it to his own place, polished and polished until he had a heap of rags stained with the green that had eaten the brass. Knowing he’d never want to undertake that task again, he shellacked the whole damn thing to keep it from tarnishing. It worked for a long time, past the births of all three of their children. But as the years passed, the tarnish crept back, and now it is the tarnish being protected by the coating. June still likes it. Or she likes Peter’s frustration whenever he stares at it too long.

June and Peter in a bed too small for him. Stretched out, he must either cram an inch of his head between the bars of the headboard, point his toes through the bars at the foot of the bed, or bend his knees. Peter’s a big man, nearly six and a half feet. Wide, too. June has never seen a man so wide and yet not fat. When they were newly married, she straddled him and lay her palm at the edge of one nipple, then her other palm, crossing over and over again. Five hands between, an expanse of a man. Even now that his belly grows soft and extends farther out and down--another two pounds every year--nothing can dwarf that chest.

Or perhaps this should be a study in contrasts, the before and after. Flat stomach to non-flat. His hair, always curly, turned from fat rings of black to ones of gray. The beard fading to white, only black above the lip. Green eyes, sharp and hard as always. Really, he has not changed so much. A partial softening, a partial lightening. June also hasn’t changed much, at least if viewed while sleeping. Her blond hair still the same shade at fifty-five as it was at twenty. And when relaxed in sleep, the lines are less visible, no skin sags. Upright and awake, things tighten and crinkle, others droop--thanks to the three children she carried, the years of being outside with toddlers, with cattle, with her own dissatisfaction. But asleep, she is young.

There in bed: a sixty-year-old man and his wife. She’s ten inches shorter than him; the bed fits her fine. Her foot rests lightly against his calf. His hand lies close to her hip, sharing heat. Then something in him shifts, the brass feels like a constraint, so he turns over to curl up. This wakes June, and before he can swing his heavy arm over her chest, her hair under the weight of his head, she slips from the bed. Time for coffee.

Downstairs now, the percolator wheezes. She drinks a glass of water, makes toast with butter and dewberry jam. The kitchen, like the rest of their home, is farmhouse meets minimalism with a healthy sprinkle of antiques from both sides of the family. June pours the coffee, walks softly back upstairs, passing Peter, still asleep, and what were once their children’s rooms (now a guest bedroom, rarely used, and an office). At the end of the hallway, she opens French doors to the balcony, a big rectangle of white-painted wood enclosed by a low railing of more white-painted wood, shaded by the eave and its extra attic space above.

By the time she’s finished her toast, started on the coffee, the front door opens below her. She has more time alone in the winter, but Peter gets up early in the summer, gets up with the sun. He wants his cup of coffee, his large slatted wooden chair, while the air has any chance of being cool. The front porch is identical in size to the balcony above, but it doesn’t catch as much of a breeze. He pulls the chair close to the house, far enough that the creeping, slanting light cannot reach him. As he settles in, June waits for his good morning. Instead, Peter’s cell phone rings, rattling the glass-topped table it sits upon.

“Hayden. Everything okay?”

Peter’s brother. As the crow flies, their neighbor, but because the Brazos lies between them, they may as well be miles away. This suits June fine. She’s not uneasy with the cemetery and funeral home that make up Hayden’s livelihood. She’s just not a fan of the man. In his defense, though, he’s not the type to typically call this early.

“He’s with you?” Peter says.

June is skilled in making out the missing half of her husband’s phone calls, yet she’s not sure what to make of this--who the he is, why Peter sounds near joyful about it. Or maybe she does suspect but chooses to ignore that whiff of doom now in the air.

“Noon would be great. Can you put him on?”

Shit, June thinks.

“Okay, then. And thanks, Hayden.”

She hears Peter set the phone back down on the table, waits for him to speak. His long silence confirms it’s news she doesn’t want to hear. She holds out her half-full cup, a foot away from her wicker chair and her bare feet, and tips it, watches the coffee spill out and down, slipping straight through a gap in the boards of the balcony’s flooring. Though she can’t see her husband, she knows his exact location, something confirmed by his swearing as the hot liquid finds its target. Her small acts of violence, a near-weekly occurrence, aren’t premeditated. They surprise her even more than they do him.

“I want to point out, before we even begin, that none of this is my fault. I woke up all innocence this morning,” Peter says. Their first words are often spoken this way--through her wooden floor, his wooden ceiling.

June snorts, not because she really blames him for the news he’s about to share but because she can’t ever see him as innocent. Peter is a man who loves with deliberation, but his lust is not so orderly. Their three children make up only half his offspring, and all were born after he married her. Though he has managed to leave those indiscretions behind, they still worm into June’s thoughts. Thus the acts of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Large Print
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593414098
• ISBN 13: 9780593414095
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien