{"id":1405,"date":"2018-12-31T17:05:09","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1405"},"modified":"2018-12-31T17:05:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:05:09","slug":"kennedy-presidio_081218","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1405","title":{"rendered":"Kennedy, Presidio_081218"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

Randy Kennedy<\/span> was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Plains, a small farming town in the Texas Panhandle, where his father worked as a telephone lineman and his mother as a teachers\u2019 aide. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to New York City in 1991 and worked for twenty-five years as a staff member and writer for the New York Times<\/span>, first as a city reporter and for many years covering the art world. A collection of his city columns, Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York,<\/span> was published in 2004. For The New York Times<\/span> and The New York Times Magazine<\/span> he has written about many of the most prominent artists of the last 50 years, including John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Nan Goldin, Paul McCarthy and Isa Genzken. He is currently director of special projects for the international art gallery Hauser & Wirth. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Janet Krone Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, and their two children.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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LITERARY ACTION\/ADVENTURE<\/p>\n

Randy Kennedy<\/span><\/p>\n

Presidio: A Novel<\/span><\/p>\n

Touchstone<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-5011-5386-0 (also available as an e-book and audio-book), 320 pgs., $26.00<\/p>\n

August 21, 2018<\/p>\n

\u201cLater, in the glove box, the police found a folder of notes. It said: Notes for the police.\u201d<\/p>\n

Troy Alan Falconer hasn\u2019t been home to the fictional Texas Panhandle town of New Cona in six years.<\/span> Despite his trepidation, Troy returns, answering a summons from his younger brother, Harlan, whose wife, Bettie, has absconded with all the money he had in the world. The two set out to find Bettie, but the task veers awry when Troy steals a station wagon from a Tahoka grocery-store parking lot. Unbeknownst to the brothers, an eleven-year-old Mennonite girl named Martha is hiding in the back. When they discover her the next morning, Martha has an agenda of her own, demanding the brothers return her to her father in Ju\u00e1rez. An inadvertent kidnapping being degrees of magnitude worse than advertent grand theft auto, the three head for M\u00e9xico by way of Presidio.<\/p>\n

Presidio: A Novel <\/span>is debut fiction from Randy Kennedy, who grew up in Plains on the Llano Estacado. Kennedy decamped for New York City, where he wrote for the New York Times for twenty-five years, first as a city reporter and then covering the art world. Kennedy\u2019s prose about the large hold of small places, the people as weather-beaten as the landscape, grabs you and refuses to relinquish its grip. Original and enthralling, Presidio<\/span> is American realism in the vein of John Steinbeck<\/span> and Stephen Crane.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing I saw when I unwrapped my copy of Presidio<\/span> was a blurb by Larry McMurtry,<\/span> sitting at the top of the cover like a crown. McMurtry frequently obliges his tetchy reputation. During a speech at a Fort Worth museum in 1981, in the first-person testimony of then\u2013book editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram<\/span> Larry Swindell,<\/span> McMurtry \u201ccategorically put down Texas writing and Texas writers, dismissing them individually and collectively as having produced no literature of lasting value.\u201d McMurtry charges sentimentality regarding myths of ourselves. We generally plead guilty, which is what makes his blurb of Kennedy\u2019s first novel a surprise. So, expectations raised.<\/p>\n

Troy, emotionally fragile, is a wild thing, all eyes and ears and reflexes. He woke one morning, a switch in his head having flipped sometime in the night, and decided to check out of conventional society, to embark on \u201cthe careful and highly precarious maintenance of a life almost completely purified of personal property,\u201d never feeling better than when he\u2019s on the move. The notes he left in the last stolen car list some of his favorites things, including stealing cars, a task in which \u201chabit was [his] chief accomplice,\u201d his \u201conly adversaries dogs and insomniacs,\u201d and motel rooms during hot afternoons smelling of \u201cfreon and anonymity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Troy\u2019s narrative alternates between third person and those first-person notes, as well as back and forth in time, from formative vignettes to the current aborted search for Bettie turned run for the border. Troy\u2019s dry humor and weary, paranoid voice claims stealing cars a way of life, \u201ca calling that felt almost religious \u2026 I would have been its reverend, preaching my message of freedom through loss from my pulpit behind the dashboard.\u201d This is when I had a conversion experience.<\/p>\n

Rendering a sparse land in rich detail, Kennedy writes West Texas as James Lee Burke<\/span> writes New Iberia. I live in the part of Texas Kennedy writes about, so I step out my front door into Kennedy\u2019s landscape and it is spot-on, the land acting as a fourth main character.<\/p>\n

Precise, economical word choices pack an emotional punch out of proportion to their brevity. When Troy visits his family\u2019s cemetery plot he thinks that \u201call he ever felt in a cemetery was a sense of looking for something in the wrong place,\u201d the dash after a birthdate on a gravestone for a man not yet passed is a \u201ccruel piece of punctuation standing in for a man\u2019s whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Expectations met. Presidio<\/span> is a modern tale of the Old West, of life on the shifting margins with grifters and drifters, a peculiarly American restlessness.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Randy Kennedy was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Plains, a small farming town in the Texas Panhandle, where his father worked as a telephone lineman and his mother as a teachers\u2019 aide. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to New York City in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}