Model Home

Starred review from December 14, 2009
Puchner’s heartrending first novel (after the collection Music Through the Floor
) traces the gradual ruin of a family in the 1980s. By the time Warren Ziller’s car is repossessed—he tells the family it was stolen and tries to keep the family’s money woes a secret—he realizes he made a mistake in hauling his family from the Midwest to Southern California to get rich quick on real estate. Warren’s wife, Camille, suspects her husband’s squirrelly behaviour indicates he’s having an affair; 11-year-old son Jonas has developed strange obsessions; 16-year-old daughter Lyle is miserable and misanthropic; and college-bound son Dustin is a handsome surfer with punk rock dreams. The unhappy family’s annual camping trip inspires Warren to confess their dire financial straits, earning a momentary reprieve cut short by a natural gas explosion at their house that horribly burns Dustin. The Zillers move to one of Warren’s depressing model homes and nearly fall apart until a new crisis involving Jonas creates a tenuous unity. With careful attention to nuanced and fractured perspectives, Puchner teases a fragile beauty out of the loneliness that separates the members of this family.

June 28, 2010
Puchner's darkly comic coming-of-age tale offers a complex array of takes on 1980s California: worshipful, acidic, and all points between. Warren and Camille Ziller and their three children have moved from the Midwest to Southern California in search of the blissful American dream, but find, instead, a kind of collective unraveling. Shuttling between parents and children, bedrooms and beaches, Puchner's novel is read by the charming David Colacci, who is attentive to the story's brutality, its pathos, and its stinging comedy. Colacci lazily ambles his way through, his lackadaisical tone belying the conscientiousness of his reading and the slowly spreading melancholy of Puchner's book. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 14).