PRAISE FOR NEON GREEN
“Funny, sad, weird, timely: in Neon Green, Wappler mixes up her own distinct cocktail of these into a substantive and affecting debut.” Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master
“Part historical novel, part alternative history, Neon Green captures the suburban-American experience at the cusp of the Internet Age, and asks its readers to consider what unites—and what threatens—a family. Strange yet accessible, goofy yet also, somehow, heartbreaking, this wonderfully original novel made me see everything around me in a new beguiling light: from my own family to the big unknowable sky above me. A debut to be reckoned with.” Edan Lepucki, author of California
“Neon Green is an extraordinary, inventive literary triumph. Margaret Wappler’s breakthrough novel of a family coming to terms with modern life is deftly written, uniquely hilarious, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. Evoking the imaginative pleasures of Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Don DeLillo, Neon Green depicts family life, environmentalism, marriage, illness, and spaceships with ingenuity and sophistication.” Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps
“The story of an American family’s confusion, pain, and joy is given an ingenious new form in Wappler’s assured debut. Deeply moving, unsentimentally nostalgic, surreal, and hilarious, her alternate 1990s unravels the curiosities and sufferings that reveal our character and transform our souls.” J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest
“Neon Green is a time capsule: it captures a moment, a slice of recent history, a feeling, a way of life. Wappler writes with humor, warmth, and intelligence. Filled with jewel-like sentences and insights that add up to a rewarding and deeply affecting novel.” Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
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Copyright © 2016 by Margaret Wappler
ISBN: 978-1-939419-93-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943619
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover design by Scott Arany
Jacket Design & Typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
For David
CONTENTS
PART ONE: FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
PART TWO: SPRAWL
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
PART THREE: MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM ET FASCINANS
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ADDITIONAL THANKS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
The spaceship hovers on a thin black line. Above the spaceship is outer space, the black gone depthless, matter stacked until it has exploded into either too much existence or not enough. The void between glistening planets, static with Stardust until punctuated by chaos. To arrive here, the spaceship dodged rock masses, burned-out moons, and light-sucks. But now it waits, parked on the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Below, the land is partially obscured by gauzy layers of chemical haze and creeping cloud covers. In luxuriating patterns, the layers shift and crisscross, surround and dissolve into one another. People, metal, trees, sand, animals, and water occupy the planet. The people spend their time chopping, building, corralling, killing, harvesting, distilling, melting, commuting. In waves, particles, and sheets, pollution regularly sloughs off into the atmosphere, carried up and up. The chemicals appear to dissipate but instead have settled in the upper regions of the sky, where they trap heat. The spaceship has been waiting for days now, occasionally spinning in circles. Waiting, it stares down, taking in everything it sees.
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August 1994
Prairie Park was a two-mile slice of dream community: moderately affluent, educated, safe, and green. Prized for its quality schools where the kids buried time capsules preserving Bop magazine, Depeche Mode cassette tapes, the front page of the Chicago Tribune, and a clutch of Jolly Ranchers. This suburban grid, rich and pliant, with Montessori day care and weekly farmers’ markets, supported all the spoils of upper-middle-class American life. Between the petitions to keep Prairie Park free of nukes, dutifully signed before entering the library, and the el train shuttling workers in Reeboks