Leslie Brenner

"Leslie Brenner is an original, with a true comic vision: she has the knack of transforming the most ordinary details of modern life, with hilarious deadpan poignancy. Everything is both recognizable and estranged in this lopsided fairy tale of the pursuit of happiness and culinary satisfaction. The prose is good enough to eat."
--Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body

"Sharp and funny...With a light, inviting touch, [Brenner] portrays an embodiment of the American Dream in the twentieth century."
--Alice Dark, The New York Times Book Review

"Funny, inventive...a delight. Brenner has a sharp eye, a dead aim, and a lovely light touch."
--San Jose Mercury News

Set against the backdrop of the cold war, Vietnam, and the Kennedy assassination, Andrew Kelbow's idyllic life in the San Fernando Valley--all swimming pools and tennis lessons, Technicolor and Formica, String-Ray bikes and Mexican cleaning ladies--is disrupted one day when his entertainment-lawyer father leaves his mother under a cherry tree in the Mojave desert.

How do the Kelbows handle such upheaval in the years to follow? In denial, mostly: they're pathologically happy-go-lucky, chronically unengaged. Diversions gastronomic, nuptial, seismic, musical, and cinematic, along with a healthy dose of illicit drug use, gambling, truancy, and political activism, keep the family functioning--barely.

As the Kelbow family pushes the fine line between the Eastern notion of living in the moment and the California hedonism of instant gratification, can simultaneously over- and underachieving Andrew focus his way out of this lunatic paradise?