The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A darkly comic, wildly original novel of a family in flight from the law, set in a near-future American dystopia.
In an America of the semi-distant future, human knowledge has reverted to a pre-Copernican state. Science and religion are diminished to fairy tales, and Earth once again occupies the lonely center of the universe, the stars and planets mere etchings on the glass globe that encases it. But when an ancient bunker containing a perfectly preserved space vehicle is discovered beneath the ruins of Cape Canaveral, it has the power to turn this retrograde world inside out.
Enter the miscreant Van Zandt clan, whose run-ins with the law leave them with a no-win choice: test-pilot the spacecraft together as a family, or be sent separately to prison for life. Their decision leads to some freakish slapstick, one nasty bonfire, and a dissolute trek across the ass-end of an all-too-familiar America.
As told to his daughter by Rowan, the Van Zandt son who flees the ashes of his family in search of a new one, the story is a darkly comic road trip that pits the simple hell of solitude against the messy consolations of togetherness.
Jeffrey Rotter's The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering is an indelible vision of a future in which we might one day live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rowan Van Zandt retrospectively narrates Rotter's (The Unknown Knowns) dystopian satire of a future America ruled by rival corporations. Rowan relies on his violent, brainless twin brother, Faron, for protection from the dangers of their life amid the ruins. The American polity collapsed with the demise of the Gunts, a semi-mythical oligarchy. Now Bosom Industries and its ilk maintain just enough order to keep the citizenry employed and consuming. When Bosom's agents discover perfectly preserved Gunt mechanisms intended to launch a rocket to Europa, Rowan is skeptical; everyone knows the Night Glass surrounds Earth, and other planets don't exist. With no willing volunteers for a trip, Bosom coerces the bumbling Van Zandt clan, tightly bonded in love, rum, and homicide, into becoming space pioneers. Cast as a letter from Rowan to his daughter, this inventively epic recounting of the Van Zandts' ineptitude is desperate, lyrical, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Not every insight is profound, but enough of them are to make this bizarre adventure eminently worth reading.