Boonville

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“A brilliant new voice—twitchy, corny, sly, cackling and sad, but most of all, racing with vitality and goosing you to keep up. Boonville is the creepy and hilarious coming-of-age story the territory deserves—not your parents’ Vineland, but your own.” — Jonathan LethemBoonville is the story of John Gibson, the reluctant heir of an alcoholic grandmother who fled the normalcy of her own “American family” to live in the redwoods-surrounded northern California hole in the wall town of Boonville where she is known as the “squirrel lady.” In her will, she leaves John her decrepit cabin. Needing a change from the pastel and air-conditioned life in Miami, John ditches his girlfriend and condo and heads to Boonville to claim his inheritance. He soon discovers it is not the hippie, free-loving town he assumed it was, and the locals—with the exception of Sarah McKay, a commune-reared “hippie by association”—are not happy to see a new face, especially a handsome outsider.

John and Sarah are two young people actively searching for self and community in a small town of misfits, rednecks, and counter-culture burnouts. Boonville is the darkly comic tale of how they try to reassemble the facts of heredity, sexuality, personal expression, love, death, the possibility of an existence without God, and what happens whey they choose to make art from their lives.

Surrounded by misfits, rednecks, and counterculture burnouts, John Gibson—the reluctant heir of an alcoholic grandmother—and Sarah McKay—a commune-reared “hippie-by-association”—search for self and community in the hole-of-a-town Boonville. As they try to assemble from the late-twentieth-century jumble of life the facts of sexuality, love, and death, and face the possibility of an existence without God, John and Sarah learn what happens when they dare to try to make art from their lives.

“Because I think Boonville by Robert Mailer Anderson is terrific, I am obliged to state that he is not a relative. He has, however, written a most exciting first novel and gives more than a few signs that he could become a member of that vanishing American breed—a major novelist.” “Robert Mailer Anderson’s a brilliant new voice—twitchy, corny, sly, cackling and sad, but most of all, racing with vitatlity and goosing you to keep up. Boonville is the creepy and hilarious coming-of-age story the territory deserves—not your parents’ Vineland, but your own.” “Boonville heralds the debut of an engaging, clear-eyed new talent. (Robert Mailer Anderson) is writing as one of the rare members of his emerging generation that brings a true moral and philosophical depth to his edgy subject matter.” “Anderson’s outstanding first novel is a volatile mix of hippies and rednecks, a solitary anarchy-loving deputy named Cal and an illicit-substance indunstry that makes Colombia look like it’s winning the war on drugs.” “Energetic, abrasive and very funny….What we demand from a novelist like this one is not subtlety but steamroller prose, which is exactly what Boonville delivers.” “Boonville offers a quirky slice of California that’s not for the faint of heart. Anderson is a bold, bright funny writer who keeps the pages turning.” “It’s the funniest first novel by an American writer to come my way since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” “Anderson’s debut novel is a jolting journey…witty and insightful…” “This agreeable goof may prove to be the first genuine cult novel since Tom Robbins went mainstream”

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