The world will end in three days, and Abigail Augenbaugh needs to be ready. So she prays, distributes leaflets and ignores her cynical workmates. Her family have their own myths to cling to. Her husband, Burns, spends his days asleep and his nights bathing in the light of pornography videos and a PlayStation golf game, dreaming of a pretty pharmacist and a war he barely fought. Their son William inhabits a comic-book world in which he is able to move through the streets unseen and destroy his enemies. He has no friends, skips school, wears whatever dirty clothes he can find and eats what he can scavenge. Joy, PA is a desperately sad book that could make you want to crawl into a ditch and stay there. But instead it drags the reader with feverish energy through a few days that see the Augenbaughs’ fractured existence blown apart. It’s a portrait of a failing town, too: Joy, Pennsylvania may boast rich country-clubs and SUVs, but its economy is slumping and its community broken. This is rarely an enjoyable read, but there’s compassion in its hammering heart and poetry in its bleak, relentless prose.
