Sometimes prison looks like a jail cell, and sometimes it looks like a million dollar beach home. For The Invaders' Cheryl, a 40-something housewife, and Teddy, her 20-something stepson, it looks like the fictional Little Neck Cove, Conn., where community tension over an influx of lower-class outsiders comes to a head during one ill-fated summer. In Believer editor Karolina Waclawiak's darkly humorous, incisive second novel, the lines in the sand define these characters' lives until the privileged few of the beachside hamlet begin to lose their country club decorum.
The chief charm of The Invaders is its wickedness, which seeps into major elements and minute details alike. The novel skewers the ensconced, incestuous community from beginning to end, name-dropping bloodlines (the local bike-riding drunk descends from President Hoover), name brands (Cheryl met her philandering husband when she worked at a Ralph Lauren outlet) and the benzodiazepines on which both Cheryl and Teddy rely. Theirs is an empty world, measured in parties everyone dreads and bodies that fail them with every new wrinkle or atrophied muscle. Why, then, are they so compelled to stay and fight?
Waclawiak (How to Get into the Twin Palms) answers this question by way of rebellion. Faced with the privatization of local beaches and the loss of Little Neck's easy charm, Cheryl and Teddy stand their shifting ground in the face of a storm both literal and metaphorical. In the midst of invasion, these two may not manage a victory, but their fight makes for a keen, transfixing read. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer