Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The linked novellas that comprise Weil's debut bring readers into America's remote, unforgiving backcountry, and delicately unveil the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.
The last novella, 'Sarverville Remains,' is the longest and the best. The loner this time is the 30-something Geoffrey Sarver, a mentally disabled gas station attendant who finds himself at one corner of an unlikely love rectangle ... A hippie commune appears briefly in each novella, the only place they intersect, and it reveals something fundamental about each main character ... Read back to back to back, these novellas form a triptych — detailed works in their own right, they offer more than the sum of their parts when taken together. Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.
Weil's debut is a stark and haunting triptych of novellas set in the rusted-out hills straddling the border between the Virginias ... All three pieces, despite their somber tones, offer renewal for their protagonists. Taken individually, each novella offers its own tragic pleasures, but together, the works create a deeply human landscape that delivers great beauty.
