Eternal Graffiti: A Novel

by Peter Marlton

Overview

“I don't know if this is a confession or a purge, a scream or a lullaby,” begins twenty-seven-year-old Owen Kilroy's journal, in which he writes about the remarkable women—friends and lovers—who've come and gone and who have shaped his life, as well as the many varieties of heartbreak he's experienced.

Owen revisits himself as a seventeen-year-old guitar player, songwriter, and drug dealer in a small, fictional California desert town. He relives being arrested, violently, by half the town's police force and sent to juvenile prison. He faces the pain of being disowned by his mother and having his father disappear. And he re-experiences inadvertently killing his girlfriend by providing her with drugs.

After escaping from juvenile prison, ending up broke, desperate, and homeless in Venice Beach, he eventually meets Kiera, a nineteen-year-old Irish student at UCLA. She is the great love of his life, a love that he knows would cripple him if he were to lose her. Now, ten years later, Owen discovers that writing about her and all that came before isn't enough. If he is to move on, he realizes he must go back to California and face his ghosts directly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611883329
Publisher:	The Story Plant
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 8.03(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Peter Marlton is a pseudonym for Pete MacDonald, both as a fiction writer and as a musician and songwriter. He was born in San Francisco and has lived in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and in three European countries. He’s published short stories, a novella, and essays in various literary magazines and The New York Times.

Editorial Reviews

07/01/2022

In 2008, Pete MacDonald (The Battered Suitcase) wrote a New York Times "Modern Love" piece about a man visiting his estranged mother's grave. It's moving, seemingly autobiographical, spare, and direct. In this new novel written under a pseudonym, he covers similar territory with less success, relating years in the life of Owen Kilroy, from 1970 to 1980. Owen's a small-time high school drug dealer, who escapes Wagon Train Ranch for Boys and heads to Venice Beach in search of his buddy Shooky, who owes him a thousand bucks. He moonlights in pornos to scrape up enough cash for pot and mac and cheese. Then he meets the love of his life at a surf shop. Keira's a sexually liberated UCLA student from Ireland, who lacks an Irish accent and the ability to choose men who are worthy of her. They get married. They move to New York. Tragedy strikes. Unfortunately, this rendition lurches from scene to scene in fits and starts, with stilted dialogue. At turns melodramatic and banal, it would benefit from judicious editing and a singular through line. VERDICT Skip this one and hope that the author returns to the pared down, more skillful style of his previous work.—Christine Perkins

Library Journal