The Gray New Deal, a new novel by Miriam Kuznets
Five decades ago, Barry, Vihaan, Jane, Ellen, Tomás, Doris, and Pearl were college housemates sharing a co-op in Austin, Texas. Now Barry, who is by far the most economically successful, buys the fire-damaged co-op for his friends to live together once again. Older, wiser, battle scars and all, they create a community, one built on their love for each other and an understanding that only such a long history can provide.
Still, they can't ignore their complicated pasts, nor can they turn a blind eye to the approaching horizon: What to do when one's health inevitably fails? What happens when meager retirement savings run out? And then, what happens when the pandemic kicks in? As a result, each housemate will have to make difficult decisions as the household support system, however time-tested and robust, is put to the test.
Praise for a Gray New Deal
“In this deeply original novel of communal living, a group of seniors move back into the college co-op where they once came of age. What starts as a nostalgic experiment becomes a moving exploration of grief, love, friendship, memory, and the unfinished work of growing older, reminding us what it means to be alive at any age.”
— Chaitali Sen, author of The Pathless Sky and A New Race of Men from Heaven
“Miriam Kuznets finely wrought and deeply felt debut, The Grey New Deal, is a paean to the hope that one can choose one's own family. The cast of this wry and often funny novel were housemates back in college; time, fate, a lack of funds, and everlasting attachment have brought them back to living in a co-op of sorts where they annoy, enhance and stand by one another through the buffeting winds of these crazy times. Their stories are pure, contemporary Americana.”
— Helen Schulman, author of Fools for Love and Lucky Dogs
“The Gray New Deal is a hymn to precarity. The friends of West House, aging and downwardly mobile, are brought together at first by necessity, drifting through a precisely realized Texas hovering on the edge of the COVID pandemic. This is a book about the small and slow and necessary actions that create community, and as its characters reckon with the wounds of the past and the uncertainty of their future, they show us how fragility can be transformed into strength.”
— Celia Bell, author of The Disenchantment
“Elegant and profoundly funny, The Gray New Deal reads like a timeless parable about connection and community. But as her characters risk loving each other in a world where disruption—a geological outburst, a nasty lockdown—has become the norm, we realize that Miriam Kuznets has lured us through the looking glass. We end up gazing with astonished eyes at the strange world we live in now.”
—Debra Jo Immergut, author of You Again and The Captives
“Miriam Kuznets has written a brilliant novel that preserves in amber the absurd times we are living through. It opens with a powerful image that brings to mind the toxic event of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but it’s presented with the empathy and warmth of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Throughout, Kuznets’s sentences perform a sleight-of-hand that only the best writers achieve, simultaneously drawing me into the novel’s many worlds while causing me to pause long enough to appreciate the beauty of the writing. I flat-out love this book, and I urge you to read it.”
—John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph and The Fear
"The intimacy of the characters’ lives in The New Gray Deal feels utterly compelling and impossible to turn away from. Miriam Kuznets has written an endearing novel that brims with compassion and healing, two things the world could use more of these days."
—Oscar Cásares, author of Where We Come From
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