Boarded Windows

A bravura debut novel hailed as “a continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man” (Greil Marcus). Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade’s stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening. Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks’ debut novel captures the music and mood of America’s fading boomer counterculture.