South

A mosaic of grief, a lifetime of love and loss, rendered with the cadence of Hemingway and Denis JohnsonA novel comprised of twenty-two discrete stories told by shifting narrators, South chronicles thirty years in the life of Bert, a writer attempting to reconcile his Romantic ambitions with his grief over the death of his mother, and his wife Trudy, a painter yearning to cement her place in a rapidly evolving American culture. Within their idyllic marriage, the fissures that were once obscured become evident as the couple grapples with the loss of their child in a premature birth. In the wake of this monumental loss, Bert and Trudy leave their hometown to live off the grid in rural Vermont, where the symptoms of unresolved grief begin to take their toll. Over the next decade, Bert and Trudy’s marriage steadily falters under the weight of monotony and unfulfilled ambition, and the American dream as lived by the two young idealists begins to lose its center. In an attempt to revitalize their youth, they depart to live as artists in 1980s New York City. As they struggle to come to terms with their persistent discontent—both with themselves and each other—the story delicately unfolds and, in the minutiae and depth of their experiences, articulates the neuroses of lives lived in quiet despair. In South, Richard Ploetz provides what the American novel has been lacking for decades: a story about good people plagued by tragedy and the burdens of everyday life. In this devastating debut, Ploetz writes with intelligence and intoxicating honesty, reminding us of the essential beauty found not in righteousness or ambition, but in the complexity of the lives we live beneath our delicate ideals.