Adam Gnade's second novel, Caveworld, is a howl of desperation as its characters fight to find love and meaning in a society with which they feel out of step. Richly encyclopedic and set in the twin border towns of Tijuana and San Diego, the book tells two love stories separated by a gulf of twenty years. Caveworld is made up of the various events (both subtle and seismic) that change lives in an instant.
Gnade covers a lot of ground: sex and pervasive loneliness in teenage bedrooms, life-shaping horror in the Vietnam jungle, birth, school, work, marriage, depression, crime, murder, mood-flushed road trips crossing the continent, exile (whether on Mexican rooftop or country estate), and living rooms smoky with the sad and oft-times devastating absurdity of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." Equally influenced by Joan Didion's West Coast storytelling, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and James Joyce's early examinations of place, Gnade's Caveworld is an epic, sprawling saga of American life.
