Future Forum Book Club: Waterloo
When: Thursday, August 16, 2007, 6:30 pm
Where: Mozart's :: 3825 Lake Austin Blvd.
Contact: Rob Crosnoe [crosnoe@mail.la.utexas.edu ...]
The next meeting of the Future Forum Book Club will be Thursday, August 16 at 6:00 at Mozart's (3826 Lake Austin Boulevard). We will be reading the thinly veiled Austin political tale, Waterloo, by the Austin-based writer Karen Olsson.
From Publishers Weekly: In Olsson's intricate, ambitious debut novel, the titular setting, an undisguised Austin, Texas, figures just as vividly as her sympathetic slacker protagonist, Nick Lasseter. A news and politics reporter, Nick, at 32 years old, suffers a faded sense of purpose. He's hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Liza, who just got engaged to her now wealthy childhood friend, Miles. The Sunset, Nick's favorite dive bar, is closing down, another sad sign of the times since the tech boom altered the city's landscape. Jaded by political rhetoric, Nick is tired of his beat, and his editor at the Waterloo Weekly warns him he's underperforming. But Nick is assigned to profile Beverly Flintic, a newly elected Republican state legislator, whose story the narrative follows alongside Nick's.
Beverly, a middle-aged married woman, is having an affair with beefcake gubernatorial candidate Mark Hardaway. She's also embroiled in an urban planning scheme, a boondoggle Nick's alcoholic uncle Bones tips him off to. This story, along with a growing romantic interest in fellow reporter Andrea Carter, might be the key to restarting Nick's engine. With clean, brisk prose, Olsson brings a specific, authentic sense of character, time and place to this story of Texas politicians and muckrakers.