Prosperity, a novel
Author
Jenna Leigh Evans
Author Bio
Jenna Leigh Evans was recently named one of LAMBDA Literary’s LGBT Emerging Voices of 2014. She has been published in In Pieces: an Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, Ping-Pong; Electric Literature’s The Outlet, FragLit, The Nervous Breakdown, The Toast, and Autostraddle. In the early aughts she co-wrote a comic restaurant review column for the Valley Advocate called Run Away With Dish and Spoone with her R.V.L. Jones, a job which eventually gave her gallstones but was, until that point, just as fun as it sounds. Her debut novel, Prosperity, was a finalist for the 2012 Eludia Award and a semifinalist for the 2013 Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize.
She was born in 1969. At fifteen, she dropped out of school and left home with twenty dollars and her belongings in a pillowcase. Ensuing job titles include truck dispatcher, cleaner, farmhand, busboy, dishwasher, cashier, cobbler’s assistant, psychic reader, courier, housepainter, secretary, prep cook, stable hand, telemarketer, and (naturally) barista. She spent two years posing as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute to take classes with the pioneering postmodern writer Kathy Acker; to date, it’s the only formal education she’s had. She has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Western Massachusetts, Maine, and, briefly, in a 2000 Plymouth Minivan. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Description
America has finally figured out how to make deadbeats pay up: the PROSPER program, a very modern, very luxurious debtor’s prison housed in a shopping mall. When curmudgeonly hobo Percy Rue first gets there, she’s as lonely as she is broke – and the only person who’ll talk to her is Lita Takewell, a drug-dealing New Age priestess she’d rather avoid. But when Percy uncovers sinister machinations behind the program’s helpful façade, Lita is the only one she can trust – and maybe the key to her survival.
Prosperity is speculative fiction; social satire; a pitch-black dystopian comedy set in the very near future. It is a novel for anyone who has ever found something absurd – or maddening! – about corporate culture, cubicle jobs, debt collectors, webinars, infotainment, political activism, advertising, government assistance programs, billionaire philanthropists, shopping malls, Town Hall meetings, New Age spirituality, Big Pharma, bureaucracy, awkward friendships, celebrities, minimum wage, anarchists, video games, the criminal justice system, outsourcing, food courts, education, on-the-job training, privatization, psychotherapy, or standing on line at the DMV.
The author writes: It took me nearly a year to save the money to produce this book. I kept the bills stashed in a paper bag, adding to it when I could. When I took it to the bank, excited to be able to send the money order to the self-publishing company, one of the hundred-dollar bills turned out to be counterfeit. The teller held it up to the light, then tore a corner off. “A good copy,” she mused. I began to snivel, which embarrassed us both. When I replaced the bad bill with a hundred out of my account, it left me with a little over five bucks.
This isn’t reverse-bragging: I’m only one out of – oh, let’s say — 39.8 million or so Americans are living under the poverty line, a tightrope act above a safety net that is currently more holes than webbing. Yet in our culture it feels socially incorrect, possibly unpatriotic, to admit how hard it can be just to get by. I hope it shows in Prosperity that I believe, above all, in the healing power of being witnessed, and bearing witness. I hope my readers, whatever their economic situation, feel witnessed. And I hope they laugh, because I believe in that too.
Book excerpt
Percy pushed back her chair slowly; slowly she went to stand before the Deputy Marshal. The two others there would not meet her eyes.
“All right. Any of you electing to be transferred to a correctional facility?” asked the Marshal. No one answered. He nodded. The Indian woman in the beautiful embroidered sari appeared in the doorway and stood there swaying slightly as though stunned by a blow. When she saw the Marshal, her mouth set in a line and she came to join his party, staring straight ahead.
The Marshal led the four of them down a corridor and through a set of double doors that opened, jarringly, into a parking bay swirling with chilly air and fumes in which a charter bus was idling. In the mephitic orange light, armed guards in military kit were milling around. Without further ado he walked them to the bus door. “Oh-kay folks, move it along,” he chanted at them musically. “Move it along, move it along, move it along. This is where we part ways.”
There did not appear to be anywhere to run to. Percy’s legs began to tremble. “My things,” she said in a thin voice. “My bags, my things.” She had to be practically shoved aboard, like a horse into a trailer.
The bus was nearly full, and the odor of stressed human bodies thickened the familiar smell of upholstery and temperature-controlled air. The driver, unwrapping a hard candy, instructed Percy to pass her plastic wristlet over a reader. Percy goggled. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Pass your wristband over the scanner, like this,” the driver demonstrated.
“But what’s happening?” Percy cried.
One of her party, a stooped man who appeared to be tottering with exhaustion, stepped onto the stairwell. “You’re holding up the other passengers,” the driver sighed, exhaling a root beer smell.
Not budging, Percy said, “We’re being taken against our will.”
A woman a couple rows back rose in her seat. “Just like this lady says. This is kidnapping, plain and simple.”
The bus driver, employing an intercom, said, “I do understand your concerns, but I need to ask everyone to take a seat. If you feel there has been a misunderstanding, or you are here because of an error, you will be able to take it up with your caseworker just as soon as we reach the facility.”
The stooped man on the interior steps shuffled forward, silently nudging Percy along.
Percy flailed her arm at the scanner’s glassine eye, sloped into a seat, then shot back up and scurried to the lavatory. Her cramped bladder took whole minutes to relax. Erroneously she tried to recall what the acronym PROSPER stood for. Something about “Sales-Positive Economic Recovery.”
The lavatory rocked gently with the weight of the last few people boarding. She heard angry voices: where, what’s, what about my?
Caseworker, orientation, patience, the driver’s voice replied again and again, buzzy through the bathroom door.
Author Website
https://jennaleigh-evans.squarespace.com/
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