Rocket City: A Novel - Hardcover

Alpert, Cathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1878448625 ISBN 13: 9781878448620

Publisher: Macmurray & Beck Communication, 1995

Synopsis

A quixotic first novel encompasses two parallel love stories, traveling through fires, carnivals, dust storms, New Mexico motels, atomic test sights, and desert towns strung together by highways. IP.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

of such modern classics as Cowboys Are My Weakness and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with a touch of Geek Love thrown in for good measure, Rocket City is a deliciously original and strangely moving novel of alienation in America's Southwest.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set in the motels, highways and restaurants of New Mexico, Alpert's first novel is an elegant and witty, if modest, peek into the lives of a handful of characters in the American Southwest. Successfully sidestepping the cliches of the road novel, Alpert introduces her cast of fully dimensional characters with strong, selective strokes. At 26, Marilee Levitay (whose French-punning name is one of the author's few breaches of subtlety) is crossing the desert in her Dodge Dart to marry her high-school sweetheart, Larry. In the shadows of both the White Sands Missile Range and her own anxieties about life, Marilee meets a hitchhiking dwarf named Enoch. The unfolding of their uncannily erotic relationship is the heart of the novel, but Alpert gracefully weaves in the destinies of her secondary characters?an insurance salesman in hiding, a buck-toothed checkout girl, a landlady tamale chef. Comprised of conversations and chance meetings, the story is fundamentally subdued and rarely surprising; there is never much tension about whether Marilee will marry the fraud Larry. However, Alpert's imagery?melons on a car seat, a stunted boy digging in the dirt with a spoon?is inventive and often beautiful. Wry dialogue and a lean sense of humor give life to this novel about the awkward comedy of overcoming loneliness.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmurray & Beck Communication
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1878448625
• ISBN 13: 9781878448620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348