Unleashed: A Novel - Hardcover

Emmons, Cai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059347144X ISBN 13: 9780593471449

Verlag: Dutton, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Set amid California’s wildfire season, a vivid and magical novel following a family in crisis thrust on a collision course with the world around them that has an outcome beyond their wildest imaginings . . .  

When Lu and George Barnes drop their only daughter, Pippa, off at college, they return to their Sonoma home to find that their paths have diverged. Confronted with an empty nest, Lu’s increasing dissatisfaction with their materialistic lives becomes impossible to ignore. She is most content outdoors, finding the animals in her backyard far superior company to her pretentious neighbors. In contrast, George is eager to throw himself into his business, a local winery with an elite clientele, as well as his art collection. He cannot for the life of him understand his wife’s discontent.
 
Meanwhile, Pippa feels completely adrift at school in the bustle of LA—its unfamiliar noises, its unfriendly atmosphere. She finds comfort only in the beloved family cat she’s brought with her and in her zoology class, which makes the world seem just a bit brighter. As Lu, George, and Pippa struggle to adapt, growing apart in the process, tensions outside the family are mounting as well; women have been disappearing across the country with no worldly explanation, all while California’s wildfire season is swiftly approaching, bringing with it a reckoning that none of the Barneses can avoid. 
 
At once a grounded story about love and family, and a transcendent tale about the power of nature, Unleashed is a stunning look at what matters in an all too chaotic world, the things that sustain us when we are on the verge of losing it all, and how we might find ourselves in the most unexpected of ways.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cai Emmons (1951-2023) was the author of six novels—His Mother’s Son, The Stylist, Weather Woman, Sinking Islands, Unleashed, and Livid—and a story collection, Vanishing. She held a BA from Yale University and two MFAs, one from New York University in film and the other from the University of Oregon in fiction. Before turning to fiction, Emmons wrote plays and screenplays. Winner of a Student Academy Award, an Oregon Book Award, and the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize, and finalist for the Narrative, The Missouri Review, and the Sarton awards, she taught at a variety of institutions, most recently in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon.

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1

By the time they took Pippa to college, the rift between Lu and Pippa was already a year deep. The trip was marked by Pippa's tapping. She drummed her thighs, tapped her pinkie nail against the window glass, plucked the taut elastic strap of her backpack. Ta-dum, da, da, da. Tsk-tsk, dum. Lu could tell she was trying to tap quietly, so as not to annoy George at the wheel, who was easily irritated by his daughter's compulsive rhythm-making except when it was part of their special game, but Lu couldn't fail to notice-nothing about her daughter escaped her notice, especially since Pippa's hostility had set in.

When they hit the San Fernando Valley, the traffic turned rabid. Cars hurtled themselves from lane to lane as if their drivers misunderstood the laws of physics. Each was shiny-new or recently cleaned-their chrome serving as pilot lights that ignited the sun into blinding spears. Lu watched it all, aghast. It had been a while since she'd been to Southern California. She remembered the beaches, but not this endless concrete and asphalt, this hysteria.

"Welcome to the Wild West," George said, peering into the rearview mirror at Pippa, hoping to get a rise out of her. Any conversation would have been better than none, since their hours with her were numbered.

"Don't goad her," Lu said in defense of her daughter, though she, too, wished Pippa would talk instead of cocooning into herself, already gone. Didn't Pippa feel the zero-hour nature of this trip? Didn't she feel a need to come to some dŽtente? Lu strained to remember what it had been like when she herself left home. Had her mother, Linda, been as bereft as she felt now? It was all so different back then. Lu and Linda had lived together, just the two of them in "The Nest," a six-hundred-square-foot house in Redding, until Lu was twenty and moved to Sonoma for a job at a spa.

Lu twisted to look at Pippa, who was staring out the side window, one hand on the traveling case beside her, which held her cat, Alice.

"I was just remembering that time when you were four years old and you wandered down Sunset Loop stark naked. Remember? You made it all the way to Juniper Road before someone found you. Do you remember that?"

"No, Mom. I don't remember. You've asked me that a million times."

"You were adorable. You weren't the least bit embarrassed. You were so happy in your own little body."

"Okay. Okay. Can we not discuss this?"

Lu faced forward again, catching George's eye. The incident had humiliated George, who hated to have their neighbors thinking of them as derelict parents, but Lu had loved Pippa's feral quality. She had loved looking out the kitchen or living room window and seeing Pippa's bare body dancing around the yard, gathering sticks and stones to build structures, squatting to dig holes in the dirt, drumming on the tree trunks, and making hats of the broad catalpa leaves. Sometimes she would lie on her belly and put her ear to the ground to see what she could hear-she heard raccoons and mice, she said, once a cougar. When George objected, afraid of who might drive by and see, Lu put her foot down and made him butt out.

Along the side of the freeway embankments of dry grass rose like hunched shoulders, some of the grass blackened from recent fires. They passed under digital signs flashing notifications of delays. Lu was no stranger to heavy traffic, but this felt extreme. Where was everyone going? Why such urgency? She held her breath, afraid for them all. Her daughter, her husband, herself.

Ta-da-da-dum. Ta-da-da-dum.

Pippa's withdrawal, after years of exceptional intimacy between mother and daughter, began with her saying she didn't want Lu texting her at school, and she wanted to be called Phipps, not the infantilizing name Pippa, a shortening of her full name, Philippa. She recoiled from Lu's hugs and no longer confided in Lu about her days, her fears, her obsessions. Lu had tried to take Pippa's moodiness in stride, inwardly hopeful that things would change, understanding that all daughters needed to establish identities separate from their mothers, but privately she was heartbroken. How could you begin to call your daughter a new, tough-sounding name like Phipps after years of thinking of her as Pippa, your very own Pippa, the girl from the poem "Pippa Passes," which George so often recited: "The year's at the spring / And the day's at the morn . . ." Lu loved that poem and would have learned some of it herself if she'd had the talent for memorizing that George had. Now just thinking of the poem made her sad. With Pippa about to be so far away at college, it seemed less and less likely the two would ever get close again.

Worse, George was probably right: LA was not the right place for their eccentric, animal-loving daughter. He had always talked about what he called California's Great Divide. The northern part of the state, where they lived, was home to the best and the brightest, he said, home to the people with intellect and taste and savoir faire, like Back East, where he had grown up, or even Europe, but Southern California was the Wild West, crass and lawless, a wasteland of concrete, populated by people committed only to hedonism and moneymaking. He would never have considered living there himself.

You're twisted, Pippa would say in response to his rants. She had insisted all along that she wanted to study in this land defined by sun, and Hollywood, and this meshwork of twelve-lane freeways, but she had no idea what she'd chosen, Lu thought. Who did at her age?

Lu had tried to support Pippa, pressing up against the veil of her daughter's unexplained hostility, but George, even now, had not made peace with her choice of UCLA. He had wanted her to attend college Back East, as he had, at one of the Ivies, maybe, somewhere small and genteel. Pippa had scoffed. If you haven't noticed, I'm not genteel. And I'm definitely not Ivy League material.

But you're from genteel stock. George was insistent that Pippa take this seriously. His ancestors, the Barnes family, had come from England in the 1600s, and they'd made various fortunes for themselves, first in shipping, then in railroads; he wanted Pippa to feel proud to be a descendant of her brave and industrious forebears. Pippa would have none of this. She was a nonconformist, an outlier who needed to find her own path. She didn't care about George's fancy pedigree, nor did she care that her mother had no college degree. Lu applauded Pippa's rejection of status, even as she had accepted that this was an essential part of George, her husband of almost twenty years. Adaptation was a special skill of Lu's, almost a superpower, she thought privately, and she had discovered in her forty-five years of living that it was an especially crucial skill for surviving.

Dum-dum. Ta-da-dum. Dum-dum. Ta-da-dum.

"Have you been in touch with Evan?" Evan was Pippa's best and only friend at the private progressive school she had attended.

"Yes, Mom."

"He likes MIT?"

"Mom-it's been like a week."

"Right. Of course."

Alice, the cat, began to howl, an agonized, guttural sound. Confined to a carrying case at Pippa's feet, Alice had endured the trip stoically until this moment. But now she sensed something had changed. Was she aware of the crazy traffic? Was there something in the air she smelled? Pippa leaned over the carrying case to croon reassurances.

Riding shotgun beside George, Lu might as well have been a sponge for the way she felt her husband's blood pressure rising. The traffic, the howling cat, the gauntlet of driving through this parched alien landscape, was too much for him. She placed a hand on his thigh. "Calm down."

He turned to her briefly, his bear-like quality shifting from teddy to grizzly. With his heavy black beard and salt-and-pepper curls, people...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059347144X
• ISBN 13: 9780593471449
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland