The Liquidators

Review "The business of America may be business, but too few fine novels prove it.  Here's a brilliant exception...The workingman blues, as if sung by some truck-stop Homer."  Kirkus"LeClair has discovered the perfect objective correlative for the possibilities and dysfunctions of late capitalism: its liberation of creative energies, destruction of human hopes and lives, and production of material junk...a worthy addition to the tradition of American business fiction."Electronic Book Review Product Description Thomas Bond of Middletown, Ohio, has built a cros-country empire of mostly African American truck drivers who roam the nation's heartland selling off the failed products of its commerce. Aging and ailing, Bond wants to see his life's work continue, but his children are uninterested and force him into desperate measures and unexpected revelations about the family's past. When its attempts to find a succesor fail, Bond imagines a project that sets off further family conflict and surprising recognitions. From the Inside Flap In his fourth and most powerful novel, Tom LeClair takes on the American Dream, creating what has been called a "rich, gritty new myth" about the country and its people. Keenly realistic in setting and charactes, The Liquidators is both homage to and partial retelling of Absalom, Absalom! In its empathetic portrayal of the ebb and flow of daily life in what is now ritually referred to as the "Rust Belt," The Liquidators is at the same time a nostalgic defense and comic critique of an America built on material accumulation (and inevitable liquidation). It is thus also a fable of failure-an old story of patriarchal altruism and selfishness, paternalism and exploitation-that is as poignant as it is stark and true.LeClair's latest and most resonant work is an audacious tour de force that does more than negotiate the detours and dead-ends of contemporary American life. It also continues the literary passage that has marked modern American fiction from Faulkner to Stanley Elkin, to whom The Liquidators is dedicated.Advance Praise for The Liquidators A road story about the literal and metaphorical end of the road, The Liquidators is an often funny, sometimes ironic, and always profound cautionary tale about the American dream's waning glow. That Tom LeClair so compassionately probes the near-demise of a way of life and the dissolution of the family, while revealing a country hardly recognizable but for its dying dignity, makes The Liquidators what it is: poignantly brilliant.-Melanie Wallace, author of Blue Horse Dreaming and The Housekeeper A rich, gritty, new myth about the liquidating of a family and of America, and what might be saved. LeClair wrestles with the hydra-headed monster Capitalism, and in haunting vernacular eloquence, traps us into ruing either outcome of the contest -Kathryn Kramer, author of A Handbook for Vistors from Outer Space and Rattlesnake Farming Not since Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser have I read such a witty, exuberant novel of ideas about America commerce and its philosophical overlays and underpinnings. Le Clair masterfully captures and/or invents the patter of Tom Bond and his colorful competitors in liquidation, all of them twenty-first-century Barnums of bric-a-brac who rove from town to town to sell surplus goods. A terrific, surprising, heady novel.-Michael Griffith, author of Spikes and Bibliophilia From the Back Cover "A rich, gritty, new myth about the liquidating of a family and of America, and what might be saved."  Kathryn Kramer"Not since Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser have I read such a witty, exuberant novel of ideas about American commerce and its philosophical overlays and underpinnings...A terrific, surprising, heady novel."  Michael Griffith"The Liquidators is an often funny, sometimes ironic, and always profound cautionary tale about the American dream's waning glow."  Melanie Wallace About the Author A widely respe