Fic­tion

The Opti­mistic Decade

  • From the Publisher
April 13, 2018

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Rea­gan and against the Gulf War, The Opti­mistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unfor­get­table char­ac­ters, and is a sweep­ing nov­el about ide­al­ism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes every­one who lives on it.

There is Caleb Sil­ver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Lla­ma­lo, who is deter­mined to teach oth­ers to live sim­ply. There are the ranch­ers, Don and son Don­nie, who gave up their land to Caleb, hav­ing run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bank­rupt. There is Rebec­ca Sil­ver, deter­mined to become an activist like her father and undone by the spell of Lla­ma­lo and new love; and there is David, a teenag­er who has turned Lla­ma­lo into his per­son­al reli­gion. But sit­u­at­ed on a plateau in the heart of the Rock­ies, Lla­ma­lo proves that it might out­last any­one’s heady plans for it, from the ear­li­est Native Amer­i­can set­tlers to the lat­est lovers of the land.

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