About
Summary
When the architectural historian, Leonidas Vance, also a disgraced man, drives into the dying town of Cedar Falls in Vermont in a rancid yellow mail truck, he is not in search of redemption, but mute ruin. Instead, he is sucked into a barter economy of septic crises being fixed by editing stories, repairing broken roofs and broken men, and deliveries being superior to packages: connection. Among the stabbing gossip of Clementine, the preposterous strength of the spoon-whittling oeuvre of Thompson, and the clay-slap of Maya, Leo discovers that it is not straight lines that hold a life together, but, instead, the curve, the bending, the concession that is needed to keep a life together. The Necessary Curve is a sarcastic, gentile book about failure, neighborhood, and the bizarre structure of the second chance.
