My holiday reading usually begins in one of three places. There's the shelf at home where I keep all the books I've bought over the years but never got round to reading. There's the folder in which I stuff cuttings of book reviews that whet my appetite, often from way back whenever, prompting an online search or visit to a secondhand shop. And then there's the cupboard at the Guardian/Observer offices where spare copies of all the books submitted for review are kept.
Generally, I eventually pick one from each place. So I end up with a worthy tome (Tristram Shandy, say), something excitingly different (Alfred Bester's sci-fi classic, The Stars My Destination, springs to mind), and something contemporary, often by an author new to me.
I didn't know Mark Poirier's work before I picked up Modern Ranch Living on one such holiday cupboard-scramble a few years ago. It follows two slightly mixed-up people in Tucson – Kendra, a 16-year-old high-school fitness addict, and Merv, a 30-year-old water park manager. They spend an oven-like summer trying to make sense of existence while a mystery plays out at the edges of their lives. The heat of the Arizona desert connected with me instantly when I first read it, on a boiling summer holiday in Sicily. So – just for you – I travelled all the way to Mallorca to test its suitability as a recommendation by rereading it under a blazing Mediterranean sun.
And under these exacting test conditions, it came up trumps again. Unlike many contemporary US novels, the characters have lives to which I can relate; they have believable relationships with parents, siblings and friends, and, while they are stuck in ruts, they are not hopelessly so.
Kendra Lumm is one of the most intriguing female characters I have read about in a long while. She is spiky and judgmental, and she uses gym sessions both as anger management and to build her self-confidence (her clever older brother is about to leave home for Columbia University, while she flounders at school). Plussing as which, her unique way with grammar is appalling. Driven to take extra English classes to improve it, she accidentally joins a poetry programme – where she meets an important new friend who is into voodoo dolls.
Meanwhile, at Splash World, college-dropout manager Merv Hunter is torn by feelings of inadequacy around his schoolmates who did go to university (despite provocations, they remain loyal friends), and by disgust at the menial services he must provide certain swimming pool regulars. At home, relations with his mentally ill mother are strained.
Whereas so many American writers dwell on failure to thrive in a dynamic nation, Poirier's characters rise to their challenges and emerge with credit. Readers who enjoyed AM Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life will no doubt recognise a similar underlying positivity in Modern Ranch Living. For me, the added bonuses of learning about a part of America I knew little about, of arroyos and adobe houses – and some engaging tangents – made it a thoroughly satisfying beach diversion.
• Modern Ranch Living by Mark Poirier is available as an ebook and paperback from Bloomsbury Publishing
