The Lost Coast - Hardcover

Nightingale, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031214007X ISBN 13: 9780312140076

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

A diverse cast of characters--a hard-drinking cowgirl, a professor and her teenage daughter, an amorous painter, a shy contractor, a Jamaican journalist, and a beautiful attorney--bands together on a journey across the Great Basin to the legendary Lost Coast of California. A first novel.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

The usual gang of dreamers, misfits, and oversexed cowgirls come together by chance in a Nevada roadhouse and set off on a pilgrimage that, as a first novel, has all of Chaucer's verve but very little of his coherence. Everything starts in Eureka, where Cookie the fry-cook decides to shake off her husband and their domestic life to head for California. Meantime, Chiara--a New York mathematician similarly on the run from an ancient daily routine--drives into town with her daughter Izzy. Cookie and Chiara meet at the Owl Club bar, where they are joined by Renato the painter, Juha the carpenter, Ananda the lawyer, Muscovado the reporter, and the ranchers Hansel and Gertie. First, the group retires to Hansel and Gertie's ranch, where they give themselves over to an endless symposium of food, sex, and storytelling. Then they decide to hit the road, and Juha constructs an enormous house on the back of a flatbed truck to carry them all west together. The outlines of the tale are pretty clear from the start, and the evil shadow cast across it by two demented adolescents named Tabby and Grimes comes as no surprise. The two believe that deceit has overtaken the world and feel chosen to oppose it. Their quest puts them in flight, too, and although we are meant from the beginning to see them as bad news, they manage to come across as more amusing (and far more sympathetic) than their rival pilgrims. The real irony is that the tragedy they bring on at the end seems to come from another story, and it's a poor fit within the tone of this one. Windy and pompous, but fun. The endless Tom Robbins-like rhetoric and the allegorical flatness of the characters quickly becomes a nuisance, but first-time author Nightingale manages to keep the ball rolling and can turn down the volume when he wants to. Underripe, then, but promising. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

In the manner of a contemporary Canterbury Tales, this sensuous, hyperkinetic first novel takes a charismatic group of wanderers across the American West. Who are these pilgrims? Cookie, a hash-slinger and cowgirl, who's left her husband; Juha, a contractor "so burly that giant sequoias wanted mistakenly to pollinate him"; a voluptuous polymath professor and her equally enticing 16-year-old daughter; an erotically gifted Jamaican journalist with "soft heat in his hands and salt waves in his step"; a high-powered lawyer named Ananda; and lovestruck painter Renato. Gathered by chance at a dusty bar in the Great Basin region of Nevada, they throw in together on the spur of the moment, out of a fundamental spiritual lust, and decide to search for California's Lost Coast. What they find is stories. Some are told by bartenders, others by shamans or animals-fantastical tales about adolescent girls who turn out to be angels, about fishermen pulling up islands from the bottom of the sea and coyotes who visit the house of the wind. However, once the pilgrims settle down in a town somewhat shy of their original destination, the story loses zip as the players decide to open the "Improvisational Hurricane Theater Troupe" and tell stories of their own. Danger encroaches on this odd road carnival, but even the dark moments have light shadings, precisely because Nightingale takes happy liberties with distinctions between the real and the unreal, charmingly obscuring the difference between telling stories and living in them.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 031214007X
• ISBN 13: 9780312140076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 259