Maintenance

It is the year 1999. Parker and Trixie Sweltham lead a relatively placid existence in the suburbs. Childhood volleyball champ Parker is now a sales rep for DynaFlex Sporting Goods. Trixie serves as managing editor at Record of Truth, an unsuccessful genocide studies journal. Their only son, Owen, is just out of juvenile prison. Heath, Parker's brother, works tech support and spends his nights using his AbDestroyer and working on a screenplay that will change everything.

Trixie finds her predictable existence upended by an undiagnosable cerebral defect, which renders the trials of her lottery-winning mother suddenly trivial. And Owen's religious fixations seem to be stirring anew his Robitussin binges and fantasies of self-destruction. Then, at the Empowerment Expo, Parker meets Adam, an African political refugee. An uneasy friendship forms, but it turns out that Adam has violent aspirations.

Sprawling yet scalpel-sharp, Maintenance, like some twenty-first-century White Noise, takes the suburbs to a geography you won't recognize.