MODERN RANCH LIVING

Trying times in Tucson for a teenager and her neighbor.

Set in the same Arizona city as his story collection, Naked Pueblo (1999), Poirier’s second novel tracks the lives of 16-year-old Kendra Lumm and 30-year-old Merv Hunter. Kendra has been lifting weights since she was ten and now has a magnificently muscular body, but she’s not a happy camper; she pushed older brother Thomas so hard she broke both his arms. Now she’s seeing a counselor, though the reason for her anger is not hard to find. She’s not nearly as smart as skinny Thomas, and her mangled speech is as embarrassing as acne. Might she be a retard, she wonders dismally? Neighbor Merv is not much better off. True, he likes his job as manager of a waterslide park, but he doesn’t have a girlfriend and still lives with his mother, who may be going crazy—Kendra saw her in the desert clutching some electrical appliances, and escorted her home. Neither of these unhappy people is sympathetic. Kendra’s hair-trigger temper is a turnoff, and Merv is a sad-sack. Instead of a plot, we have a question: What’s behind the disappearance of Kendra’s former boyfriend Petey Vaccarino, and is it linked to a bunch of sinister meth-heads? But Petey is a fringe character, and the meth-heads are here for atmospherics, a backdrop for characters always on the boil. Kendra and homeboy Miguel want to have sex, but they end up screaming obscenities; Merv does have sex with Melissa, a knockout, but that ends in recriminations, too. Even a poetry class at the community college dissolves into name-calling. Somehow it’s no surprise at the end when Merv, who should be on top of the world after a terrific job upgrade, looks at his mother, by now a recovering lunatic with a sharp tongue, and decides he wants to break her jaw.

Bad vibes and sadistic fantasies are all that keep this limp story afloat.