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A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Ken Kalfus
In a rollicking black comedy about terrorism, war, and conjugal strife, the author whom Salon calls "a writer of chameleonic fluency" revisits some peculiar episodes in current American history.
Ecco
July 2006
On Sale: July 3, 2006
Featuring: Marshall Harriman; Joyce Harriman
256 pages
ISBN: 0060501405
EAN: 9780060501402
Hardcover
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Fiction
Joyce and Marshall Harriman are struggling to divorce each
other while sharing a cramped, hateful Brooklyn apartment
with their two small children. One late-summer morning,
Joyce departs for Newark Airport to catch a flight to San
Francisco, and Marshall goes to his office in the World
Trade Center. She misses her flight, and he's late for work,
but on that grim day, in a devastated city, among millions
seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other's dead and
each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy.
Opening with a swift kick to our national piety, A
Disorder Peculiar to the Country follows Joyce and
Marshall as they swallow their mutual disappointment, their
divorce conflict intensifies, and they suffer, in
unexpectedly personal ways, the many strange ravages that
beset America in the first years of the Bush administration.
Joyce suspects Marshall has sent an anthrax-laced envelope
to her office. Marshall taps her phone and studies plans for
constructing a suicide bomb. The stock market crash and the
war in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and the clash of
civilizations: all become marital battlefields. Concluding
with the liberation of Iraq, A Disorder Peculiar to the
Country astonishingly lampoons how our nation's public
calamities have encroached upon our most intimate private
terrors. It firmly establishes Ken Kalfus as one of the most
daring and inventive writers at work today.
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