I've often wondered about those squat cinderblock buildings situated next to broadcast towers that seem to reach into the sky for miles. Why are they there? What's inside? Who enters them? What secrets do they hold? Texas-born author Randy Kennedy must have spent considerable time speculating about the same thing. He conjures up an answer in his...first novel, Presidio: It's where you go to live when your wife has run off with all your money, the old family home has been repossessed and you have no other options ... it's to Kennedy's credit as a first-time novelist that he avoids sentimentality. His characters are flesh-and-blood real people. It's also to his credit that he avoids rendering them as chicken-fried clichés slavered with cream gravy.
...a fluent, mordant, authentic, propulsive narrative, wonderfully lit from within by an intriguing main character ... This is his first novel and it left me hoping he writes many more ... the Texas of the novel is also familiar because it’s at a tectonic moment, on the cusp between old and new, that has been written about before, and very well. Kennedy rises to the challenge and succeeds so well that both Larry McMurtry and James Lee Burke have offered their praise.
Itinerant car thief Troy Falconer has little need of possessions, yet his rootless existence consists of stealing clothes out of the seedy Texas motel rooms of similarly sized men before absconding in the victim’s car. When Troy and his reticent, bighearted brother, Harlan, set out on an ill-fated car trip across the Panhandle in late 1972, hoping to locate Harlan’s scheming wife, who has skipped town with his life savings, they inadvertently kidnap an 11-year-old Mennonite girl who is in the back of the stolen station wagon ... This deceptively polished confessional imbues the three-dimensional characters with humor, cynicism, and considerable pathos in artful contrast to the moonlike landscape of West Texas.
What starts off feeling a little like a B-movie offering the inverse of Western romance in the company of losers and lowlifes quickly transforms into a road trip...thriller defined by startling shifts and turns. Tumbling accidentally into the mix comes a young Mennonite girl, 11 years old, ethereally blond, strange, and strong, whose fate is now entangled with the brothers’, her purity a foil to Troy’s amorality. Like a herding rope, the plot unfolds in taut scenes juxtaposed with wonderful loops of description, flashback, and spare dialogue that occasionally swells into flashes of revelation, all of it grounded in a palpable sense of place.
Troy Falconer first appears in notes he's writing to explain how and why he frequents motels to steal cars, clothes, and another man’s identity. Two pages later an omniscient narrator describes Troy returning in November 1972 to his hometown in the Texas Panhandle for the first time in over six years. He and his brother, Harlan, have agreed to set aside grudges while trying to track down Harlan’s wife, who ran off with most of the money left him by the brothers’ father. Toggling between this narrative and the notes, Kennedy reveals one rootless man charting a larcenous course through America and one tied to a dot on the map .. Kennedy has a fertile imagination he lets drift into many beguiling detours, and the writing sparkles throughout.
With the right person at the wheel, some of the best road trips go nowhere in particular. Those winding up at a dead end can be most entertaining of all. Count Randy Kennedy’s striking debut novel, Presidio, in that number ... As a sort of bonus to the kidnapping drama, Kennedy sprinkles Presidio with bizarre episodes that are too morally ambiguous to be biblical parables, but whose larger message is clear enough.
In this stellar debut, it’s 1972, and Troy Falconer, a professional car thief, returns home to New Cona, Tex. Troy comes at the request of his younger brother, Harlan, whose wife, Bettie, has left him and taken all their money. The two brothers steal a car and hit the road in search of Bettie, unaware of the sleeping passenger in the backseat, Martha Zacharias, an 11-year-old runaway from a Mennonite community.
