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Narrated by Anna Fields
Karen OlssonUnabridged — 9 hours, 22 minutes
Narrated by Anna Fields
Karen OlssonUnabridged — 9 hours, 22 minutes
“You're in a slump.” Nick Lasseter's boss is talking about his job performance as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, but he might as well be talking about Nick's whole life. His current assignment, a profile of a legendary liberal ex-congressman, is in trouble even before the subject abruptly dies. When Nick grudgingly agrees to write a piece about a rising female Republican legislator, he stumbles onto a political fight in which the good guys and bad guys start to seem interchangeable. Then, when he gets involved with the late congressman's confidante, it seems that not even the deceased can be relied on to stick to their stories. Some things never change: the moral ambiguity of practical politics, and the hilarious cluelessness of young men in love.
Depending on how you count, Karen Olsson's first novel has five or six protagonists. Two are black, two are women, two are politicians, two are drunks, two are deceased—and if you include it, one is the small city of Austin, Tex., never mentioned by name in the pages of Waterloo but rendered there unmistakably and affectionately…a funny, intelligent novel about people who are at odds and at home with each other, just like in a real town.
—The Washington Post
In Olsson's intricate, ambitious debut novel, the titular setting, an undisguised Austin, Tex., figures just as vividly as her sympathetic slacker protagonist, Nick Lasseter. A news and politics reporter, Nick, at 32 years old, suffers a faded sense of purpose. He's hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Liza, who just got engaged to her now wealthy childhood friend, Miles. The Sunset, Nick's favorite dive bar, is closing down, another sad sign of the times since the tech boom altered the city's landscape. Jaded by political rhetoric, Nick is tired of his beat, and his editor at the Waterloo Weekly warns him he's underperforming. But Nick is assigned to profile Beverly Flintic, a newly elected Republican state legislator, whose story the narrative follows alongside Nick's. Beverly, a middle-aged married woman, is having an affair with beefcake gubernatorial candidate Mark Hardaway. She's also embroiled in an urban planning scheme, a boondoggle Nick's alcoholic uncle Bones tips him off to. This story, along with a growing romantic interest in fellow reporter Andrea Carter, might be the key to restarting Nick's engine. With clean, brisk prose, Olsson brings a specific, authentic sense of character, time and place to this story of Texas politicians and muckrakers. Agent, Amy Williams. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
In her first novel, Olsson, an accomplished feature writer and award-winning investigative journalist, offers an affectionate and gently humorous tribute to her hometown of Austin, TX, (referred to here as Waterloo) before the high-tech boom of the 1990s changed it forever. This is a story about musicians and politicians who are "united in their desires not to have to work too hard, to be locally renowned, and to drink beer paid for by somebody else." Aging former musician Nick is estranged from his girlfriend and working unhappily as a reporter at a local newspaper; maturity comes when he confronts his personal problems and the changes that have come to Waterloo-subject matter that Olsson skillfully depicts. Not surprisingly given the author's profession, politics and journalism also play a major role in the story and are handled with intelligence and insight. There are some weaknesses, however, mostly in terms of secondary character development and awkward plotting. Yet this debut still has much to recommend it. For libraries with large fiction collections.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Acid-sweet tale of life, love and politics in slackerville. Texas Monthly writer Olsson's wry first novel is set in a lightly fictionalized Austin, Texas, a town disoriented by the tech boom. Centered on the tight-knit political scene (it reads like a post-script to Billy Brammer's The Gay Place), Olsson's characters cross paths as they struggle fitfully toward action through a haze of heat, alcohol and compromised ideals. Nick Lasseter, a reporter for the no-longer-independent Weekly, is sunk in a torpor exacerbated by the paper's new "serve the consumer" attitude and his ex-girlfriend's engagement. His uncle, Bones Lasseter, is an alcoholic wreck of a wily lobbyist who misses the '70s, when cheap rent, drugs and ideals were easily attainable. Distracted by her affair with the dimwitted but handsome gubernatorial candidate, Republican freshman legislator Beverly Flintic unwittingly sponsors a bill written by a national land developer and innocently breaks with the party line. An ambitious black woman, Andrea Carter is just putting in her time among the white liberals at the daily paper, but finds herself drawn to Nick's world of drinking, music and eccentricity when they go on a few dates. (Latinos, by the way, are oddly absent from Waterloo.) Andrea is haunted by her father's Waterloo legacy as a desegregationist and employee of congressman William Sabert, whose death opens the novel. Mourned as one of the last great liberals, Sabert is really a moderate who drifted into greatness. Indeed, the importance and danger of drift, mess, moderation and nostalgia is Olsson's true subject-and a strength and weakness of the novel. Olsson's narrative lines touch, but do not cohere. Importantthings happen, but the action seems deliberately muted, belated, offstage. Ultimately, however, Olsson's dry irony, nuanced observations and enjoyably moody atmosphere build into a sophisticated portrait of her hometown. A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere, and one bound to get Austin locals gossiping.
“A melancholy comedy of Texas politics [written] with great wit and assurance.” —Mark Costello, The New York Times Book Review
“Frank, clever prose.” —The Believer
“Pleasantly ambles along like a Patsy Cline ballad. . . . Olsson masterfully incorporates . . . a theme of transience . . . into each story line.” —Time Out New York
“Olsson's true achievement: connecting the real world of state politics and raw deals to an imaginary world of human frailty and complexity . . . What makes Waterloo transcendent of its time and place is Olsson's ability to draw out the common humanity between liberal journalist Nick Lasseter and conservative politician Beverley Flintic.” —Austin American-Statesman
“An affectionate and gently humorous tribute to . . . Austin . . . Politics and journalism play a major role in the story and are handled with intelligence and insight. . . . This debut has much to recommend it.” —Library Journal
“Acid-sweet tale of life, love and politics in slackerville . . . Olsson's dry irony, nuanced observations and enjoyably moody atmosphere build into a sophisticated portrait of her hometown. A debut to be enjoyed by idealists everywhere.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Intricate, ambitious . . . Clean, brisk prose.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ambling, amiable, and super-smart.” —Daily Candy
“Wistfully mischievous . . . A shrewd roman a clef [and] that rare accomplishment, a provincial fiction that finds the universe in a grain of Texas silt . . . A melancholy, jolly take on human imperfection.” —San Antonio Current
Anna Fields gives another in a string of fine performances. Karen Olsson's novel about reporter Nick Lasseter is a light story of political intrigue amid characters who never fully grasp the difference between right and wrong. At the center is Lasseter, whose reporting leads him to a Congressional confidante, with whom he becomes intimately involved. Through it all, Fields reads with a keen sense of character and a superb sense of timing. She is also adept at making each character seem charming, funny, or serious, as needed, without losing focus on the novel's plot, thus making this Texas story a pleasant diversion that will surely appeal to most listeners. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940169861402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Excerpted from Waterloo by Karen Olsson. Copyright © 2005 by Karen Olsson. Published in October, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
PART ONE
One
His ability to put tasks in sequence was the first thing to go. William Stanley Sabert, the former congressman, ambled into the kitchen, carrying in his good hand, the left one, a glass tumbler. With the weaker hand, the only partially recovered right, he pressed a sheaf of papers to his ribs, but not carefully enough: his attention slipped and then the papers slipped, they fluttered to the floor. Pick them up, he told himself. He could not. Certain capillaries in his brain had gone dry; they dangled like shrunken empty gloves. He couldn’t pick up the legal-pad pages he’d covered with notes or the hearing transcripts or—where did that come from?—the Christmas card that slid out from the sprawl. The notion of retrieving all of it loomed and then faded, as showers of tiny particles, boluses, bits and pieces of the midbrain clot that had just exploded inside his head, infiltrated the network of his vessels. He couldn’t pick up the pages on the floor because first he would have had to put the drinking glass down. He would have had to lean over. He would have had to reach for the papers and clasp them with his good hand. The sequence of steps had escaped him.
It was his third stroke, though, and he did have an idea of the enemy. He fought back. He’d come into the kitchen to fix something to eat. He intended to do that. No matter that making a sandwich was a more complex task than fetching the papers that hadfallen. He opened the refrigerator and set his drinking glass on the top shelf next to the orange juice. He closed the refrigerator. He took a bag of English muffins from the breadbox, pulled open the oven door, and placed the bag inside the oven. Next, tuna fish—but as he straightened himself Sabert saw only color, throbbing reds and greens. When the room returned, pale and blurry, his eyes were flooded. He touched his sleeve to his face.
Dishes sat in the sink; errant cashews and flakes of cereal lurked under the cabinets; mice lived in the breadbox. And that was just the kitchen. There were also the hairs clouding the bathroom floor, the towels heaped in a corner, the bottle of chardonnay forgotten in the toilet tank. A shelf in the bedroom closet had collapsed, and a hail of campaign buttons and umbrellas and old photographs and the silver serving forks from his first marriage (Delia had taken the spoons) had landed among shoes and old pine inserts. For all his storied acuity, his talent for clarification, for cutting through legislative knots in a few incisive strokes, Will Sabert had always been a force of entropy.
And now these papers spilled across the linoleum. He’d collected them to show the reporter, to help explain the work that had engaged him over the past year. What a relief, a pleasure, to have stumbled upon such a project, one that gave shape to his solitary days. High time he revealed it to someone. A legal method: he had discovered it, having devoted to that end many weeks of research, quite a lot of sorting through precedent and records of international tribunals. A method to end all wars, this was, entailing minimal adjustments to current statutes and treaty agreements. He had condensed the argument in favor of it, that is to say the argument for ending war, to a simple, watertight petition that could be understood by any high school student. It was clear, after all, that the wars of the twentieth century had been unjust, unnecessary, and without question, inefficient from the point of view of costs. He’d hoped to live long enough to expand his premise into a book, but lately he’d begun to fear otherwise. Hence his plan to go over it all with the reporter. There was some doubt in his mind, though, as to whether the reporter had already come and gone.
The first stroke had been almost twenty years earlier: a tingling on the way to the cafeteria, and by the time he sat down to eat, his hand and arm had gone numb. He pretended to have lost his appetite. By later that afternoon he was back to normal. He went on working just as before.
The next one had followed his retirement. A headache, unlike any headache he’d ever had. Icicles splitting his skull into pieces. A trip to the hospital, a poor prognosis. That time his whole right side crumpled, and proper names hid themselves. He could say the words son and daughter but the names of his own children wouldn’t give themselves up.
Now his mind was beset by a cascade, a closet shelf falling, an avalanche of old possessions. His children, his mother, his first bicycle, his dog. The fountain he and his brother had ridden their bicycles to on the terraced grounds of the state Capitol, a fountain long since bulldozed to make way for office buildings and parking garages. Its water had spouted from pink gargoyles’ mouths: there, one terrible hot day when he was ten or eleven, an older boy trying to hawk a few bruised peaches had taken a swing at Will, after Will had called him a capitalist. He dodged the punch. His little brother Robbie had gotten it instead. Smacked in the face. Bloody nose. Scared to fight, Will had grabbed Robbie’s arm and run away. This was his last memory.
No one was there to see the former congressman back up against the countertop and slide down the cabinet face. His shirt caught against a drawer pull and tore; his hip fractured; his great old moppy head fell to one side and was still.
