We've Already Gone This Far

Wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, a housing boom and bust: the past decade has taken its toll on the working-class Massachusetts town of Wequaquet, a place where love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed. In his debut collection, Patrick Dacey recounts the lives of neighbors and fri [...]
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Wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, a housing boom and bust: the past decade has taken its toll on the working-class Massachusetts town of Wequaquet, a place where love and pride are closely twinned and dangerously deployed. In his debut collection, Patrick Dacey recounts the lives of neighbors and friends as they brush up against each other, searching-privately and collectively-for an almost out-of-reach version of the American Dream. A lonely woman attacks a memorial to a neighbor's veteran son; a dissatisfied housewife goes overboard with cosmetic surgery on national television; a soldier writes home to a mother who is becoming increasingly unhinged. With a skewering insight and real warmth of spirit, We've Already Gone This Far takes us to a town like many towns in America, one that lives in the shadow of two long wars, plagued by both apathy and disquiet, but where life's strange intensity and occasional magic is still felt. Dacey delivers that rare and wonderful thing in American fiction: deeply-felt, deeply-imagined book about where we've been and how far we have to go.