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    Town & Country
    Town & Country
    Town & Country
    Ebook33 pages29 minutes

    Town & Country

    By Jess Walter

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    About this ebook

    From the bestselling author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins, a father-son story that underscores why Jess Walter is not only among the funniest writers working today but among the most bighearted and humane.

    Jay is nothing like his hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, blue-collar dad. He’s college-educated, works as a graphic designer, prefers white wine to whiskey, and is gay—a fact that’s been lost, with so much else, in the growing fog of his father’s dementia. When the woman with whom his dad has lived for decades throws him out (thanks to a little neighborly infidelity), Jay moves his dad in with him in Boise—at least temporarily—until he can find an eldercare facility for the old man. But the search turns out to be far more complicated than Jay realized—what place will not only care for his dad but let him be who he imperfectly is, bad habits and all? The answer to that question takes father and son to a 1950s-style motor inn, the Town & Country Senior Inn, where the only therapy on offer is nostalgia and happy hour starts at 3:30.

    In turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Town & Country describes a son’s greatest act of tolerance and acceptance in a world—a distinctly American one—that hasn’t always shown him the same. It’s a story, as only Jess Walter could write it, about all the ways we cannot help but love each other even when, owing to political, regional, and generational divisions, we do not, and maybe cannot, understand each other.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateMay 21, 2020
    ISBN9781094409429
    Author

    Jess Walter

    Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

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    Reviews for Town & Country

    4/5

    70 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A deft blend of whimsical and down to earth; fantastic!
    • 5/5
      Great story, lots of wry humor mixed with tenderness. The Town & Country is an awesome idea. I know it's supposed to be satire, but there's gotta be a huge market for these places!!
    • 5/5
      JW manages to be insightful, touching, and funny, all at once.
    • 5/5
      I’ve missed Jess Walter’s writing. This was a perfect appetizer until his next book comes out.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant, funny and scarily accurate. An scorchingly honest look at a nucleus of a family as a metaphor for how our society looks like right now.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Few writers do humor and pathos and balance the timely and the timeless so well. Always feel in good hands (and good heart) with Walter.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The boy was only gay because he was adopted by gays and raped by the gay white supremacists kids of his foster mother who couldn't keep her legs closed long enough to blow her nose. Because of his foster moms addiction to sex and attention from any man she came across she had no time to love her kids. Thats just sad. They never tell the whole truth in these stories. I know the characters personally and his ex wife was the cause of the dads pain. She was a liar con artist and lady of the night. Shame on her. I hate this book its trash. Just like the miserable like of the person who wrote it. Lol


    Book preview

    Town & Country - Jess Walter

    MY FATHER’S GIRLFRIEND CAME HOME from the casino a day early and caught him having sex with the woman across the street.

    I thought you were going to be gone another day, my dad said by way of apology, or explanation, or perhaps just narration. His girlfriend, Ellen, had been away on her annual girls’ weekend in Jackpot, but since these girls were all over seventy, they were forced to cut the trip short when one of them had a heart attack playing keno at Cactus Pete’s.

    All of which is to say, my father and his girlfriend were not the age you’d expect for this kind of drama. Dad was seventy-five, but he’d lately begun exhibiting signs of dementia, one of which, I was surprised to find out, was this late-in-life promiscuity, an erosion of inhibitions. Dad literally could not remember to not screw the fifty-eight-year-old lady across the street.

    This wasn’t the first time, either. To hear Ellen tell it, my father had devolved to the point that he had the impulse control of a glue-huffing teenager. He’d whistle at women, proposition waitresses at diners right in front of her. Ellen could be a little bit crass herself, and she didn’t seem particularly angry or even sad. I’m just done with the son of a bitch, she said. She told me she had no choice but to kick Dad out of her house, where he’d lived since my mother died fourteen years earlier.

    As we backed out of the driveway, Ellen stood, arms crossed, behind the screen door. Next to me, in the passenger seat, Dad squirmed under his seat belt like a little kid. The back seat was packed with boxes of his clothes.

    I feel like she’s slut-shaming me, Dad said.

    That’s not what that means, I said.

    Section Break

    I HAD KNOWN for some time that Dad was fading; it was one of the reasons I’d moved back to Boise from Portland three years earlier. Dad had begun forgetting names and places, and said increasingly strange and inappropriate things. He seemed lost, disoriented, unsure of the year, the season, the day—classic signs of dementia. But, for me, there was nothing as alarming as the day in 2016 when Dad told me he’d voted for

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