Boonville

by Robert Mailer Anderson

Overview

Surrounded by rednecks, misfits, and counterculture burnouts, John Gibson ­the reluctant heir of an alcoholic squirrel-sculpting grandmother ­- and Sarah McKay - a commune-reared "hippie-by-association" - search for self and community in 1989 rural Mendocino County, California. The dying logging industry is colliding with the economic rise of wineries, tourism, and the unregulated marijuana trade in The Emerald Triangle. Boonville is the hilarious, darkly comic tale of how John and Sarah try to reconcile the facts of heredity, sexuality, personal expression, love, death, the possibility of an existence without God, their cultural wars, and what happens when they choose to make art from their lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798988633617
Publisher:	UpCal Entertainment
Publication date:	04/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	308
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Robert Mailer Anderson is a writer, producer, activist, and 9th generation Californio. He is also the author of the novel "Boonville," co-writer/producer of the films "Windows on the World" and "Pig Hunt," the play "The Death of Teddy Ballgame," and has been a contributor to The Anderson Valley Advertiser for 40 years, among other publications. He is a board member of PEN Oakland, the advisory board of Los Cenzontles, and was appointed by Governor Newsom to the California Humanities Board in 2020. As a music producer, he has been nominated for three Grammy Awards and won two NAACP Image Awards. He was the 2013 Colonial Standard Bearer for the Selkirk Common Ride and received the San Francisco Arts Medallion in 2016.

What People are Saying About This

Martin Cruz Smith

Robert Mailer Anderson is a young writer of energy, style and wit. Those three qualities may not sell books in today's hyper-market, but I found them charming.

Jonathan Lethem

Robert Mailer Anderson's a brilliant new voice - twitchy, corny, sly, cackling and sad, but most of all, racing with vitality and goosing you to keep up. Boonville is the creepy and hilarious coming-of-age story the territory deserves - not your parents' Vineland, but your own.

Naomi Wolf

Boonville heralds the debut of an engaging, clear-eyed new talent. Robert Mailer Anderson has achieved an engrossing vision of tangled lives on the edge of the world, and done it on an ambitious scale. He has drawn the Northern California counterculture scene, its mores and wildnesses, with a fresh, original hand. Best of all, he is writing as one of the rare members of his emerging generation that brings a true moral and philosophical depth to his edgy subject matter.

Carl Hiassen

Robert Mailer Anderson is a very sick man - and a very funny writer.

Norman Mailer

Because I think Boonville by Robert Mailer Anderson is terrific, I am obliged to state that he is not relative. He has, however, written a most exciting first novel and gives more than a few signs that he could become a member of that vanishing American breed - a major novelist.

Editorial Reviews

What we demand from a novel like this one is not subtlety but steamroller prose, which is exactly what Boonville delivers. — Mary Park

The New York Times

An eclectic knot of hippies, rednecks, marijuana growers, assorted eccentrics and Miami expatriates inhabit the California town of Boonville, pop. 715. Anderson's debut novel is a jolting journey among these misfits, occasionally witty and insightful but more often rambling, losing its way amid too many disparate pop culture references and unwieldy attempts at edgy prose ("Outside the apartment, Florida air hung as hot and tight as a sunbather's butt thong"). John Gibson leaves an empty life in sunny Miami after a tussle with his girlfriend and heads west to the house his grandmother bequeathed him in Boonville. Upon arriving, he immediately runs afoul of the locals, an odd mixture of inbred hill people and various contingents of hippies, including leftovers from the 1960s and a more contemporary crop. He's relieved when he meets commune-raised Sarah McKay, with whom he feels a connection, probably because she's remotely normal and beautiful. Sarah has her own set of issues to plow through, however, which she does in interminable fashion. The plot hinges on John's attempts to escape beatings by Sarah's ex-husband, a violence-prone redneck, and his interaction with the denizens of Boonville. Characters like the grossly fat Pensive Prairie Sunset, a counterculture holdout who spouts hackneyed lines about male patriarchy and Eastern religion, fall flat. The narrative relies so heavily on the far-out and fantastical that when it attempts to ground itself in human feeling, it scrambles for solid footing. In the end, Boonville is just another place where dreams stagnate. Agent, Jack Scovil. (Jan. 14) Forecast: When it was first published in hardcover in 2001 by the Creative Arts Book Company, Boonville garnered praise from Jonathan Lethem, Norman Mailer and Carl Hiaasen, among others. Its original word-of-mouth success should help sales of this paperback edition. Six-city author tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly