FICTION Chance of a Lifetime

Robert M. Tucker | Xlibris

481p, trade paper, $18.99, ISBN 978-1-425-72530-3

This laugh-out-loud satiric misadventure from Tucker (Byron) charts the travails of

California’s Trebourne family after geology professor Wilson, in 1989, sells their Orange

County home for a shack and a goldmine in

Northern California, without first consulting wife Claudia or their four children. “Are you going through menopause?” Claudia asks during the raucous setpiece dinner scene where Wilson reveals what he’s done. “Are you having a midlife crisis?” The answer to the latter questions is obvious—Wilson spends the novel’s earliest pages wishing he felt “lusty” again and picking asinine fights with the chair of his department. But the real crises are to come, including squatters, truly primitive lodgings, a serious health scare, and the shady practices of big-dreaming land developer/conman Bill Dixon, who sells government land to suckers.

Tucker blends parody—the Trebournes own two Volvos, naturally, and Dixon’s got a stuffed grizzly in his office—with surprising suspense elements and much empathetic characterization, of the Trebourne family, of Dixon’s teenaged son, and especially of Molly Carter and Pinto Sweet, prospectors already living on a claim that Pinot expects doesn’t have enough “color” “to keep him in grub and whiskey.” Amid the calamities and confrontations, Tucker is engagingly attentive to the experience of being uprooted, to the excitement of nature and exploring and choosing a new bedroom, and to the possibilities of lives taking root, however reluctantly, in fresh soil.

Individual scenes tend to be crisp and incisive, but the novel’s quite long and not in a hurry. Wilson’s midlife crisis is familiar territory, but once the family’s relocated, playing poker together and rallying to build a new life, he grows into a compelling character rather than a comic patsy. Less compelling are Dixon and his goons; the antagonist’s grand scheme seems ridiculous from the start, though his romantic partner, Bambi, a sex-bomb naïf (“Why do you suppose evergreen trees stay green all the time?”), eventually reveals welcome dimension. The climax contains a surprise readers won’t see coming.

Cover: B | Design & typography: B+ | Illustrations: – Editing: A- | Marketing copy: A

Warm comic novel about a family leaving the suburbs for a goldmine.

Great for fans of T.C. Boyle, Thomas Berger.