Description

Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 1980s. But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for one another -- the "slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville" they share at home -- Warren; his wife, Camille; and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites. Worst of all, Warren has squandered the family's money on a failing real estate venture.

As Warren desperately tries to conceal his mistake, his family begins to sow deceptions of their own. Camille attributes Warren's erratic behavior toan affair and plots her secret revenge; seventeen-year-old Dustin falls for his girlfriend's troubled younger sister; teen misanthrope Lyle begins sleeping with a security guard who works at the gatehouse; and eleven-year-old Jonas becomes strangely obsessed with a kidnapped girl.

When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move into one of the houses in Warren's abandoned development in the middle of the desert. Marooned in a less-than-model home, each must reckon with what's led them there and who's to blame -- and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold the family together. Subtly ambitious, brimming with the humor and unpredictability of life, Model Home delivers penetrating insights into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect, from a writer "uncannily in tune with the heartbreak and absurdity of domestic life" (Los Angeles Times).

About the Author

Eric Puchner teaches at Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His award-winning short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Chicago Tribune, Best New American Voices 2005, Pushcart Prize XVIII, and many more acclaimed journals and anthologies. His short story collection, Music Through the Floor, was a finalist for the NY Public Library's Young Lions Award and the California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Praise for Model Home…

“The subject of this marvelous novel is nothing less than the soul of the American family, in which love sometimes hides inside estrangement and survival can be a choice made under duress.  All of it is played out in the California desert, land of false dreams, and yet the result is anything but arid:  a searing, bitterly funny, achingly humane book by one of our most talented young writers.”

— Ann Packer, author of Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier

“Eric Puchner's Model Home is 1980s California in a nutshell: bright and frantic, giddy and broke, desperate and strong and always, always moving.”

— Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs

“Model Home is a fantastic follow up to Eric Puchner's remarkable story collection, Music Through The Floor. Puchner is such a tremendously skilled writer you barely notice how deftly he slips between points of view, how he creates characters that are so real their yearnings and failures become your own. This is a heartbreaking yet consistently funny novel that wraps its arms around all the beauty and tragedy of the unfulfilled American dream.”

— Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries

“Reader, rejoice!  Eric Puchner has given us a brilliant, unpretentious family saga of uncommon mastery and soul.  Model Home is filled to bursting with wonderfully rendered love and heartbreak, hope and despair, triumph and travesty.  Read this awesome novel.  Read it now.”

— Elisa Albert, author of The Book of Dahlia