And Baelthon discovers Wendy, Farmican's sixteen-year-old daughter who keeps her checkers pieces taped to the board where she and her father left them before he died. Emerging from her chrysalis of baby fat and self-loathing, Wendy is destined to be both the love of Baelthon's life and the object of his betrayal. Twenty-five years later, from the perspective of mid- and middle-class life, Baelthon recalls the mistaken selves he and the Farmicans once inhabited. What he doesn't expect-or think he deserves-is the redemption and abiding against-all-odds love that await him. FROM THE CRITICS Walter Kirn - The New York Times Book Review The book is as light and swirly and eccentric as its Marin County setting. Publishers Weekly In a droll yet often poignant tale of abandoned ideals, lost places and forgotten eras, Jones (Ordinary Money; Particles and Luck) looks back to the small, literally hidden, Northern California town of Seawall in the early 1970s. When a 17-year-old boy calling himself "Baelthon" arrives at the soon-to-be-condemned home of the late poet James Farmican, he is only seeking to make a little rent money by helping to clear out the large house as the family prepares for a move. But immediately he is drawn into the bohemian lifestyle and complex family dynamics at work within the house. The poet's beautiful widow has remarried a rich, flaky sometime idealist who has transferred their estate into a tax-shelter church and hopes to move the family to a rural retreat in Oregon. The Farmicans' daughter is discovering the power of her burgeoning sexuality. Their temperamental younger son writes bad poetry. And their eldest son put up for adoption as an infant has returned to meet his family and claim his share of a bequeathed, likely defunct casino in Void, Nevada. The narrative is told largely in the present-day voice of Baelthon, now a cynical English professor living alone in a suburban development. He has been recently reunited with the Farmicans in a scheme to wrest their father's estate from the church. Jones employs a discriminating eye for detail, playful symbolism and evocative, often lyrical prose. While making sport of his characters' youthful pretensions, he nonetheless insightfully demonstrates that neither their ideals nor their bonds to each other, however tenuously founded, have faded as completely as they may themselves imagine. Library Journal In this uncohesive new novel, Jones (Particles and Luck) explores themes of decay and dysfunction that unfortunately end up afflicting his own work. Narrator Baelthon has long been involved with the family of famed poet James Farmican, who shot himself in the 1960s. Nothing in the world of the Farmicans has solid foundations, from their crumbling, condemned house to their personal relationships, which are colored by family myths, truths untold, and history denied. Each of the characters is on a quest to discover what really happened in the early 1970s, when the Farmicans were forced from their home, the storehouse of their family history. They must find the truth or a version of it to make a claim on the Farmican estate in the 1990s. - Published at twenty four dollars.  Knopf Publishing Group 0-679-42334-6 / 9780679423348
Hardcover New  New York 

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