Goodbye, Goodness: A Novel - Softcover

Brumbaugh, Sam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890447390 ISBN 13: 9781890447397

Publisher: Open City Books, 2005

Synopsis

GOODBYE, GOODNESS is a sad but ultimately (sort of) triumphant story about the weight of personal history and the obligations of the present, about the relationships that construct our lives while simultaneously destroying them. Hayward is the great grandson of an eccentric baron of the gilded age named Finn, a man who built the first roads across the country, famous for their unearthly glow in the moonlight, the inventor of the first Sea World, an attraction that would showcase the cities of the future, and a lover of Annie Oakley, a character who deeply influenced our ideas of the American frontier. His massive legacy has ruled the generations after him and Hay’s family has been alternating between ill-conceived plots to shore up the family fortune and great hemorrhages of waste and abandon, massive purchases quickly forgotten, drunken fishing trips and even drunker prep school reunions. The novel opens with Hay recovering from a concussion in a beach house that he has broken into, having obviously gone through hell but telling the reader nothing of how he’s gotten there. In interconnecting flashbacks we see the story of his life; his early experiences with his father, his meeting at Yale of his friends Will and Kimmel, a post college romance in New York that turns into full time care-taking of an insane woman, and an eventual overtaking by alcoholism with a crash landing on the west coast. Exploring the past and the present of a deeply unconventional family and using episodes taken from Annie Oakley's actual diary, Brumbaugh illuminates the narrative of a life separated from normalcy.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Hayward Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his, and trying to understand how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a sinister producer, and his best friend’s strange escape from rehab all figure into the story. To further complicate matters, Hayward is the great-grandson of a massively ambitious robber baron who had a long-ago affair with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. Hayward begins to untangle the convoluted estrangement between these two, and confronts the possibility that Annie Oakley is his great-grandmother. The novel includes beautifully interwoven excerpts from Oakley’s autobiography that have never appeared in book form.

Goodbye, Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful, bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly sad novel, whose main characters could be the troubled descendants of the young boys from John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. Written with the exquisite, nonchalant precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends, Brumbaugh’s novel is a new take on coming of age while fervently reckoning with the past. Readers of Rick Moody, Michael Cunningham, Martha McPhee, and Leonard Michaels will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice.

About the Author:

Sam Brumbaugh has worked in the music industry for two decades, touring with bands such as Pavement, Cat Power, and Mogwai, producing music specials for PBS, and, most recently, a documentary on the great Texas musician Townes Van Zandt, "Be Here to Love Me," to be released in theaters nationwide this spring. His fiction has been published in Open City magazine and The Southwest Review. A relative of Annie Oakley himself, he lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Open City Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1890447390
• ISBN 13: 9781890447397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277