White Guys

After graduating from high school, in the early 1970s, Billy Mogavero is the only one of a tight-knit group of five friends who didn't make it out of Winship, a hardscrabble town outside of Boston. Twenty years later, the other four—who have made their way, to varying degrees—decide to return to Winship to visit Billy, once their galvanizing alpha male and now a paint salesman who lives at home with his mentally handicapped brother. Their reunion sparks a rapid-fire chain of events as Billy finally makes the social leap his friends have spent their lives making—to suburban respectability and conformity. Enthralled by the rapidity of Billy's climb—his marriage to an equally ambitious and tough Irishwoman, Maureen, included—his best friend, Timmy O'Kane, sees in Billy's protean character and masterful adoption of middle-class norms a vital and necessary critique of his cozy existence—paid for by his wealthy wife—in a privileged Boston suburb. But when Billy, Maureen, and their unborn child are victims of a drive-by shooting in which only Billy survives, Timmy is ensnared in a series of events that threaten to spin entirely out of his control. His complicity in the aftermath of the tragedy threatens the hard-won security of his leafy, suburban idyll—but is also strangely and seductively liberating. Inspired by actual events, Giardina has created a masterful and explosive social novel about the price of the American dream.