Our Town

The debut novel from McEnroe is a shocking tale of addiction and family disintegration that takes place at the margins of the entertainment industry. Dorothy and Dale are young actors who meet when they are cast in the pilot of a 1960s television show. They fall in love, marry, and have two children: Clover and Dylan. Dorothy’s career founders just as Dale’s begins to rise. Both drink and take drugs; soon jealousy and abuse have wrecked the marriage. Dale lives the life of a playboy while Dorothy slips further into addiction and obscurity, and most of the novel is concerned with her long downward slide: she takes up with a teenage boyfriend, neglects her children, moves on to harder drugs, and becomes a progressively greater embarrassment to her ex-husband and her children. Though McEnroe has a gift for crafting scenes of familial horror (such as when teenage Dylan curls up at his mother’s feet while she injects heroin), the relentlessness of Dorothy’s march from degradation to degradation is exhausting. The icy narration strives for clarity, but ultimately the novel offers a shallow analysis of self-destruction. Clover, who seems to have mostly escaped her family’s calamities, is the novel’s most realized and interesting character, but her best scenes are too late to balance the overall work. McEnroe has undeniable talent; his next book will be one to watch out for. [em](May) [/em]