Gold Country

“Gold Country is a fearless, thrilling book. I admire the social detail and awareness, the unsentimental sympathy with people who work for a living, the quality of including and getting beyond political territory. Pravin has enlarged her first book’s masterful verbal music to include a tremendous sweep of subject matter and tone.” —Robert Pinsky

Vignettes of working-class life create a panoramic portrait of the emotional wages of surviving in late-capitalist America

In Gold Country, Vanesha Pravin crafts indelible vignettes of labor, race, and contemporary existence that together offer a panoramic view of today’s United States. Through each life that she conveys line by startling line, she traces the disparity between aspiration and reality when it comes to the American dream: an undocumented worker waits on a celebrity, a government contractor compromises his integrity to secure the future of his children, a career waiter is haunted by the contrast between his inner life and reality, and an orderly steals credit cards for a fix. Wistful and weary, her protagonists wrestle with thwarted dreams and personal shame, but in stitching together a patchwork from their lives, Pravin asks us all to confront the wider realities of deprivation, greed, and their insidious influence on how we function as a society. Gold Country offers a gorgeously nuanced portrait of working life in a supposedly democratic country, airing hard truths about labor, complicity, and the rifts between us.

Vanesha Pravin is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ May Sarton Prize for Poetry and the Golden Poppy Book Award. She is the author of Disorder (University of Chicago Press). She teaches at the University of California, Merced.

Contents

I. Red
Civilian
Red
After AIG’s Bailout Money Was Used to Pay Out Bonuses of $165 Million
Nap-of-the-earth Flight
Dishwasher
The Government Contractor
Latex
Café in a Strip Mall, Christmas Before the 2017 Inauguration

II. Gold
Vegas: The Cocktail Server
Bear Market
Career Waiter
In Real Time
VIP
Apology
Soccer
Nondisclosure Agreement
The Waiters
White Papers
US Military Budget for Fiscal Year 2018 Projected to Be $824.6 Billion
There is my rent, there is my pension
A Disc Ruptures
Industry
Fault
The Market Fluctuates
After Calculated Risk
Green Almond
After Loss
Rush
Another Attempt
The Question of Luck

III. White
Of the Developer’s Pitch
Dialectic Through a Stained Glass Window
Orchard for Sale
Subdivision, America, Early Twenty-First Century
The Meadows
Central Valley, California, 2010
The Botanist’s Eye
The Flying J Truck Stop
White
The Providers

IV. Blue
Blue
How to Read the News
The School at the Aquarium
The Fish Spin Like Go-Go Dancers
Workaholic
RSVP
Between Boss #1 and Boss #2
We Are Now at Our Cruising Altitude of 36,000 Feet
Afterlife
Business
How to Live in This World
Gold Country