Although Yellowstone is our oldest, most iconic, and most popular national park, it is perhaps, in W. D. Wetherell's words, America s least-known best-known place. Wetherell, arriving at the park on the eve of his fifty-fifth birthday, feels the need to examine where life s mileage has brought him. In the encounter that follows, a writer entering late middle age confronts not only a magnificent corner of the vast American landscape but also the American experience itself.Detailed in the wise, humorous, and lyrical language that has long distinguished W. D. Wetherell s award-winning fiction,...

This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell s stories a suburban retiree s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.
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