eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
After forty–six years in upscale Manhattan, after two roaring decades as an investment banker and after nineteen years of marriage, Bill Schoenberg lost it all and ran for the hills. He made a mistake, regrettable and unspeakable; and having fled to his neglected country house in rural New York State to gather his wits, he found a chance to reacquire his self–respect as well – and possibly even redemption.
To a man for whom flames existed solely in the kitchens of four–star restaurants, and who had volunteered for nothing in his life, the Harristown Volunteer Fire Company represented an unlikely pursuit – until a fire in his house convinced him otherwise. As Bill struggled to trade his French cuff shirts for flannel, to learn to dress in the back of a moving fire truck and to knock down forest fires, he was also forced to navigate the darker recesses of his mind and dying marriage. His wife may have been having an affair with one of his colorful country neighbors; an angry intruder seemed to be preying on his property; and his own unmentionable secret came closer to the surface the longer he stayed in Harristown.
Intelligent and entertaining, funny and frightening, THE GOLDEN HOUR is a unique novel of manhood, neighborhood, and saving the day.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062048202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Nicholas Weinstock is the author of The Secret Love of Sons and the novel As Long As She Needs Me. His writing has been featured on National Public Radio and in publications including the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Vogue, Nerve, Ladies' Home Journal, and Poets & Writers. He is a member of the council of the Authors Guild, and he works as vice president of comedy development for 20th Century Fox Television and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Amanda Beesley, and their three children.
Read an Excerpt
The Golden Hour
A NovelBy Nicholas Weinstock
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Nicholas WeinstockAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060760869
Chapter One
As one leaves Manhattan and drives up the Hudson River into the rural and unimaginable territory to the north, the tensions of the city fade gently away. In their place loom the terrors of the country. I clung to the steering wheel, sticking close to the blue-brown river. I voluntarily crossed the George Washington Bridge for the first time in my life. Here the arguments of portable radios, the car-alarm anthems and the other clashing noises of my home were distilled to the hum of traffic. Then, somewhere along the Parkway, even that went away. I steered up the Thruway with only the occasional growl and blinker of an automotive rival and with a sense of dread and freedom like nothing I'd ever felt. Hills bulked on all sides, barnacled with yellows and reds, like surfacing leviathans of the deep. Roadside telephone wires cut up and abruptly down and up again: dwindling connections to civilization that could be severed with the fall of a tree.
Two and a half hours out, the land grew howlingly empty. The occasional electric appeal of fast-food signs was replaced by the lower-wattage colors of dying leaves on trees. In Ulster County the river disappeared. In Delaware County it coldly returned. Passing the Catskill Mountains, according to my fucking unfoldable map, the car filled with the scent of pine and with the sharp, green knowledge that this was only the beginning: that I had lived my whole life on a slim island off the southern tip of something bigger, this clean slate, this triangle of woodland stretching from Coney Island to Canada. Here the sleekest of New Yorkers find themselves fish out of water, wide-eyed and gasping in the state of New York.
I was in sorry shape to begin with, given recent events, and wasn't likely to be soothed by a rare and clumsy turn behind the wheel of an automobile. Pippa had always been the one to drive us to the country house. Now, for all intents and purposes, there was no Pippa. Which left me with the challenge of shifting and pedaling and handling the unruly power of a new BMW with its steering wheel jammed in my gut, with the sales sticker still on the window, with my rearview mirror useless thanks to the wall of boxes in the backseat. In the passenger seat, miles away, rolled my survival ration of top-shelf gin. Having lived for forty-six years with the clattering efficiency of the New York City subway system -- and for the last decade with the slower nosing and unloading of its limousines -- I was at a loss in any vehicle requiring my guidance. I did own a driver's license, albeit one that had expired in 1986. The dealer hadn't seemed too persnickety on that point, hardly glancing at my boyish photo as he leaned over it to count my cash.
The signs beside the highway were barely legible through the leafy spill of Mother Nature. Towns seemed to be arranged in descending order of appeal, from the lordly Arden and Oxford and New Windsor past increasingly ominous village names ending in hook and kill. Pippa got the apartment, I thought as I accidentally flipped on the wipers and pawed at buttons in an attempt to turn them off. Which left me the rest of the world.
Or at least a house perched on the edge of it. Who'd have thought I would ever elect to live in this gilded shack in the boondocks? The country, as I'd explained to Pippa more than once, was not my forté. I did not do mosquitoes. I had no primal longing to hike through poison sumac. When it came to greenery, I preferred mine creamed and served beside an $80 steak at Peter Luger. The clever residents of New York City floss their teeth, they wax their fruit, they pay good money for razor-scraped tablecloths and the pressing of dress shirts on command. Such commands, in a place like Harristown, fell upon the deaf ears of the cornfields. Men like me drew the snickers of trees.
But what choice did I have? She had ordered me out. She had staked her claim to our apartment, and having disappointed her for nineteen years of marriage, I was not prepared to fight her as well. Which left me few options; fewer and fewer as the days went by. I could have stayed in a downtown hotel. I could have stayed at my job. A more reasonable man might have absorbed the grim twist of fate and moved on, kept at it, kept the trains running on time. I, however, had run away to the country house. This was my great escape, my mad dash to the last place anyone would look for me. The only place I could go. I had tried to get in touch with friends, but I seemed to have lost custody of them, judging by their uniform failure to return my phone calls. Not a man, she must have called to inform them soon after she'd shrieked the words at me. You're no man.
I left the highway for a road, the road for a winding lane. The buildings scattered and soon shrank to the size of houses, finally turned into barns. There were no people, it seemed: no pedestrians, no neighborhoods. The inhabitants of this outback sheltered alone. I tried two right turns and recognized nothing before I found the steep and appleless dirt path marked Apple Hill Road. I drove up the incline, spitting rocks, past the weathered shacks of the locals. The long-fingered woods closed in. The smell, now, was of soil, of mold, of rabid farm animals, and I found myself suddenly nervous at the prospect of having to get out of the car. Then the glossy white-and-blue sign for Ridgepoint Circle appeared on my right. My wheels hit the tarmac and sighed with relief. The branches fell away from our landscaped clearing of sky. After three hours in a motor vehicle, I was almost happy to see the trim lawns of emerald green rise, like a butler, in welcome.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Golden Hour by Nicholas Weinstock Copyright © 2006 by Nicholas Weinstock. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.