Conquistador of the Useless – Entertaining debut novel set in PA & Himalayas – #fiction #bookreview

Conquistador of the Useless

Joshua Isard
(Cinco Puntos Press – paperback , Kindle)

Life seems to be going very well for thirty-something suburban slacker Nathan Wavelsky. He’s an office manager who gets to fire people (but only when he’s told who to fire). And his idea of relaxed happiness is being left alone while listening to his iPod and staring at the grass and trees in his backyard. But trouble soon comes to his self-contained paradise. Among other things, his wife suddenly wants to have a baby, and his best friend, Mark, wants Nathan to go with him to climb Mount Everest. So they go, and Nathan’s outlook on life gets changed a bit when someone in the climbing team dies. This is a thoroughly contemporary and entertaining debut novel by the director of Arcadia University’s low-residency MFA creative writing program. Yet, its presentation format contains stylistic echoes of early 20th-century William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.