Word: austine
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...Austin, Nev., a rickety mining town whose gold ore was exhausted years ago, junk-shop proprietor Leo Wolfers is sweeping up a pile of window glass shattered by a mysterious sonic boom. Wolfers is used to the screaming fighter jets that take off from nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, but he says the plane that smashed his windows was no ordinary craft. "It was diamond shaped. It could rise straight up and hover. One of those planes they aren't allowed to talk about. Their pilots crash into mountains all the time, but the Navy just covers...
...Back in Austin, surrounded by rusty mining tools and curling 1950s girlie calendars, Wolfers sweeps up the last few splinters of glass. "This is their playground." He looks up at the sky. "They come in here from out East, all full of beans, and do their loop-the-loops and smash things up, and then their superiors cover up for them. They don't want bad news to get out. We locals know, though." Presumably Wolfers is talking about the Navy again, although he never specifies who "they" are. In central Nevada, "they" might be anyone...
...long stories in Women with Men (Knopf; 255 pages; $23) are related by place and similar characters: a pair of befuddled middle-aged Americans in Paris. Both Martin Austin in The Womanizer and Charley Matthews in Occidentals are profoundly obtuse about females. But their lack of clear self-awareness would ensure trouble with either...
...Austin, a specialty-paper salesman from Chicago, wants to stay married to the perceptive and unusually attractive Barbara while vigorously pursuing a dour and uncompliant Parisian named Josephine. Furious, Barbara refers to her straying mate as what could euphemistically be called the lowest part of the digestive system. Josephine calls her suitor a damned fool after he takes her young son to a park without permission. Unattended, little Leo wanders off and is stripped by older boys. Austin's humiliation is compounded by newspaper accounts alleging that he might be a child molester...
...what happened to those lazy, listless baby busters who supposedly typified the new generation? Beavis and Butt-head were their icons; Beck's Loser was their song ("Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park"); Richard Linklater's Slacker, with its Austin, Texas, deadbeats, was their movie. This was the MTV generation: Net surfing, nihilistic nipple piercers whining about McJobs; latchkey legacies, fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne's Netherworld, one with more antiheroes--Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers--than role models. The label...