TURN AROUND DON'T DROWN

In Burleigh’s satirical novel, artists in an upstate New York hamlet wallow in their soap-operatic lives as catastrophic floods close in on their village.

After friends of documentary filmmaker Drew Pierce remember him at his funeral, the narrative jumps back to the week before, when all their lives seemed relatively normal. In the flashback, Sal Hanford, a UNICEF documentarian, is having an affair, and her musician husband is apparently oblivious. But although her Californian lover is exciting, he can’t quite give her the warmth that she gets at home. Bliss St. Ours, who met her husband at art school, runs the Henderson Happy House—a camp for undergraduate art school students in Canawunk, New York; in practice, it seems more like a work camp to improve Bliss’ property (since residents paint walls, for example). Meanwhile, Drew’s wife, Grace, wants a divorce because he can’t overcome his OxyContin addiction, even after spending thousands of dollars on multiple stays in rehab. Everyone plans to attend a summer’s-end party at Bliss’ place, although a hurricane recently hit Florida, which promises heavy rain, flash flooding, and devastation to come. Burleigh’s engaging novel, set in 2012, is the second in a loosely connected trilogy. It teems with engaging characters, even when they’re self-serving and not especially sympathetic. For example, many worry about environmental issues, such as climate change and the BP oil spill, but they’re content with showing that concern solely through their art; one character, for instance, builds an ice polar bear and displays it in the desert in response to news of a melting glacier in the Arctic. Petty troubles amusingly take precedence over worries about devastating flood waters, even as meteorologists continually offer warnings. At another point, the narrative wryly paints Bliss as “too much of a feminist to concede that she’d strategically shot-gunned” her husband into marriage. Still, the author dives deep into individual psyches, which results in some hard-hitting revelations—such as Bliss and Sal being somewhat disheartened by motherhood, and the implication that Drew is an abusive domestic partner.

An extraordinary, darkly comical story of flawed characters who both embrace and disregard the outside world.