Lunch Bucket Paradise
A True-Life Novel
by Fred Setterberg
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Pub Date Nov 01 2011 | Archive Date Jan 31 2014
Description
For those of us living in an age of high unemployment, foreclosures, and diminished expectations, suburban lifein 1960s California seems like a distant dream. Working-class men, theirfingers worn by honest labor, witnessed the invention of comforts designed totake the hurt off with a beer after a long day: frozen food, washer/dryercombos, and a square of unfenced grass called a lawn. Their sons dragged the perfumed streets, discovering James Brown and trying their damnedest to work less thantheir fathers and avoid the draft. Mothers experimented with neon-yellow cakemix and fresh asparagus year-round. It was a time even the new homemovie camera couldn't capture: the silent hope of better things to come and thefleeting good fortune of mid-century.
With the sharp wit of a master storyteller, Fred Setterberg chronicles his childhood in the postwar Eden of Jefferson Manor, a blue-collar suburb of Oakland.Like a Bay Area Garrison Keillor or Bill Bryson, Setterberg reveals the quirksof his family and neighbors with nuance and care. Each chapter propels him toward adulthood while poignantly exploring class, masculinity, and modern life amidst the intoxicating abundance of a new California. In advance of this book's publication, sections of Lunch Bucket Paradise have won prizes from The Florida Review, Literal Latte, and Solstice Literary Magazine.
Fred's coming-of-age casts a bittersweet pall on today'sworld in light of the good life far out of reach for working-class families today. Reading his words, we realize the true meaning of the phrase "lunch bucket paradise": it symbolizes anera of prosperity for blue-collar Americans that may never come again.
Advance Praise
"The prose is deliciously generous, precise, and evocative. The voice is wonderful, too, and it pulls the reader deeply into organic, metaphorical territory that gracefully illuminates, among other things, the psychic minefield the American family can be. I love this story!"
-Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie
"Lunch Bucket Paradise is a rare find, a book that in so many scenes and shades of story has a eerie prescience for the future of California, even as Fred Setterberg helps us to remember the state's time of innocence and boom and new asphalt and post-war, all laid over the landscape of possibility. It's the narrator's voice, watching his parents -classic American characters!-navigate their lives as Californians, and Americans, in this place. He's funny, wry, and watchtful-a great tour guide to his own place."
-Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon and Take One Candle Light a Room
"This darkly humorous and affectionate but utterly unsentimental, look at the world of the ‘Greatest Generation' recreates a time as lost to us today as our own youth. Fred Setterberg is a storyteller with incisive talent and a large heart."
-John Raeside, founding editor of Oakland's East Bay Express
"More than an autobiographical novel, Lunch Bucket Paradise is a lyrical probing into the passion and history of the working class California myth, the American dream."
-Lee Hope, editor, Solstice
"A brilliantly clear window onto a world that seems alternately seductive, threatening, and intensely nostalgic (and often all three). I love his storytelling and admire his language. But I have no desire to visit to Frog Island with him."
-Jeff Greenwald, author of Snake Lake
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781597141666 |
| PRICE | 15.95 |
| PAGES | 256 |
