Carousel Court

June 6, 2016
In his first novel in a decade, McGinniss Jr. (The Delivery Man) paints a bleak portrait of America on the downslide. Nick and Phoebe Maguire left Boston after Phoebe narrowly avoided a tragedy involving their infant son, Jackson. Seeking a new start—Nick as a filmmaker for an Encino PR firm and Phoebe as a pharmaceutical rep—they move into Carousel Court, a subdivision in the Los Angeles suburb of Serenos, whose residents are leaving in droves, casualties of the burst housing bubble. When Nick’s job offer falls through, he signs on as a mover “trashing-out foreclosed homes” for an outfit called EverythingMustGo! The self-loathing Phoebe tiptoes the sharp edge of an addiction to prescription painkillers and an ill-concealed affair with JW, her demanding ex-boss, who jets in and out of the picture. The novel’s nearly 100 vignettes—many of them gems of concision and electric prose that lay bare the darker sides of Nick and Phoebe, as well as the handful of coworkers and eccentric neighbors who swirl down the drain with them—mirror the discontent seething just beneath the surface of an ersatz American dream. The broad brushstrokes painting Southern California in chaos are unnerving and propulsive in their own right, but McGinniss is at his best when describing, with anthropological intensity, the throes of a broken relationship.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
A young couple's plan to flip a house in Southern California goes awry and old wounds in their marriage reopen in this dark novel of unrelenting tension.Nick and Phoebe are living in Boston when they notice other "young married professionals buying and selling houses for six-figure profits." But it's clear from the word "underwater" on the opening page that their dream is foundering. McGinniss (The Delivery Man, 2008) presents a smooth combination of present-time narrative and extensive flashbacks to reveal two lives wracked by more than just mortgage woes. Their marriage has been haunted by an affair Phoebe had with her mentor, JW, while on the fast track at a financial-services firm in Boston and an accident she had while "high on Klonopin" with their toddler in the car. Moving to California doesn't improve matters. Nick learns on the eve of heading west that his new job there has evaporated. In their LA suburb, housing prices quickly go south after the couple takes out a heavy mortgage and plows all their money into renovations. Nick finds work as a kind of repo man with other underwater homes. Phoebe is a rep for a drug firm while maintaining a steady high with Klonopin and wine. Then JW resurfaces and Phoebe hopes to use him to get back on the fast track and somehow fix the family. Doomed and doughty, she's a lexicon of contradictions, a kind of update on Maria Wyeth of Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. McGinnis also recalls Nathanael West's Day of the Locusts in depicting their road, Carousel Court, as a catalog of strangeness and dangers: from coyotes and marauding home invaders to weird neighbors and crying, screaming cicadas. McGinniss covers familiar territory in the marketplace and marriage but injects it with an urgency, a sense of constant, inescapable threat that all adds up to a taut page-turner.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2016

Nick and Phoebe Maguire, the troubled young married couple at the center of this fearless, harrowing novel about life in contemporary America, are overwhelmed by debt, trapped in jobs that are killing them, and surrounded by civic disorder and financial ruin. In some ways, this realistic contemporary novel reads more like a work of dystopian sf. Unfortunately, McGinniss (The Delivery Man) is talking about us, here and now. Neighbors are living in tents in their yards. Decent jobs have disappeared. Global warming has produced extreme heat. And the safety and economic stability of individual citizens has become frighteningly tenuous. Nick and Phoebe begin with the highest of hopes--ownership of an expensive home in Southern California. It is not long, however, before they are struggling to keep up with their mortgage and attempting to survive the pitiless realities of the modern work environment. Sadly, their young son spends most of his time with nannies and caregivers. VERDICT This heartbreaking novel about a broken family offers an unforgettable and disturbing vision of contemporary America. Recommended for fans of courageous, uncompromising literary fiction.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
Nick and Phoebe Maguire are being crushed by the adjustable-rate mortgage on the house they intended to flip for a huge profit. The filmmaking job that brought Nick to California has disappeared, and he's working for a company that empties out foreclosed and abandoned homes. Beautiful, emotionally brittle Phoebe sells pharmaceuticals to doctors, but she's propping herself up with a salad of prescription drugs. Foreclosure is a month or two away. Their marriage is unraveling, and, without speaking about it, they each come up with separate, risky plans to make enough money to hold on to the house on Carousel Court. McGinniss (The Delivery Man, 2007) has written a powerful and almost unremittingly bleak novel that may have some readers recalling Yeats' poem The Second Coming. The novel's widening gyre is the 2008 economic collapse caused by banksters and mortgage companies. Curiously, no character vents about the perpetrators. McGinniss' Serenos, 40 miles east of Los Angeles, is a plausible Ground Zero for a society slouching toward Armageddon. Nature is going biblical: searing heat, threatening wildfires, emboldened coyotes, even a plague of cicadas afflict the town. And society is collapsing: home invasions are increasing, police helicopters roar low and fast over Carousel Court at all hours, and ordinary suburbanites are locked and loaded. Along with Yeats, there are echoes here of Martin Amis' similarly pre-apocalyptic London Fields (1990).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)