Vorab-RezensentenPatrick Dacey

A piercing and compassionate debut novel about the twisting ways in which the young atone for the sins of the old in small town America Robert Kelly and his wife Irene were a golden couple of the late ‘70s – she an artist, he a businessman, each possessed by a dynamism that seemed to promise them a place in a new and vibrant age. But with two young boys to care for, Irene finds herself confined by the very things she’d dreamed of having, and her painting ambitions atrophy as she struggles to invest meaning into her role as wife and mother. And Robert, pressured by Irene’s demands and haunted by the failure he sees looming, risks the family name and business to pursue a “can’t-miss” real estate scheme. Twenty years later, their now-grown sons, Nathan and Andrew, return to the Cape of their childhood: Robert is recently out of jail for white-collar crimes, and Irene has received a fateful diagnosis. Drawn back home for what might be a final time, the Kelly sons must lay the ghosts of their family’s past to rest. In The Outer Cape we revisit the fictional town of Wequaquet, the setting of his debut collection, and see Patrick Dacey’s talent stretch and soar. He delivers a story of four people grappling with the ghost of infinite possibility, a book in which chasing the American dream and struggling to survive are one and the same.

A heartfelt, vital collection; the debut of an exciting new talent already hailed as one of George Saunders' "favorite young American writers" Wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, a housing boom and bust: the past decade has taken its toll on the working-class Massachusetts town of Wequaquet, a place where love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed. In his debut collection, Patrick Dacey recounts the lives of neighbors and friends as they brush up against each other, searching-privately and collectively-for an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream. A lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor's veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, We've Already Gone This Far takes us to a town like many towns in America, one that lives in the shadow of two long wars, plagued by both apathy and disquiet, but where life's strange intensity and occasional magic is still felt. Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: a deeply-felt, deeply-imagined book about where we've been and how far we have to go.