The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Uncas Metcalfe is a sixty-five-year-old botany professor from a once prosperous central New York town, whose habitat is changing much too quickly: his wife is ill, his daughter has returned home, and an unusual new friendship unexpectedly stirs up memories of an almost forgotten infidelity. Uncas is rooted in a life of plants and manners. When his routine is upended by the menacing demands of a former student, Uncas finds his comfortably obstinate nature at odds with his family's growing impatience and a newfound, terrifying uncertainty.
The Natural History of Uncas Metcalfe follows an unforgettable hero as he struggles to right himself and adapt to changing expectations, even as he approaches the end of his life. Beautifully wrought and wonderfully imagined, the intricacies of the Metcalfe family will linger in your imagination long after the last page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The hero of Osborne's incisive debut novel is a glacier of a man. Rooted in his small upstate New York hometown of Sparta, like the five generations of Metcalfes before him, 65-year-old botany professor Uncas is a man for whom change is not an option. Having achieved a "resilient stasis," Uncas is as unwilling to accept the "physical upheaval of the heart of Sparta" as he is the "big-city prices for glorified bread" at the new bagel shop; so when Margaret, Uncas's wife of 40 years, suffers a leg injury that keeps her bedridden, Uncas loses the only buffer between his outmoded worldview and reality. The impact of his chronic stoicism on his loved ones reveals itself to Uncas when the younger of his two daughters, Fauna Fletcher, returns to Sparta with her husband, Doug, and their three children. An unlikely friendship with a rebellious teenage girl and the threat of a disturbed former student also serve to bring Uncas closer to understanding his family and world. Though Uncas's dedication to tradition can seem extreme, Osborne establishes a genuine sense of history and caring in Uncas's familial relationships with just a few well-chosen words.
