About The Book

A brilliant debut novel about New York and Los Angeles in the nineties, Annie Oakley, and the end of the American Dream

Hayward Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his, and trying to understand how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a sinister producer, and his best friend’s strange escape from rehab all play into the story. To further complicate matters, Hayward is the great-grandson of a massively ambitious robber baron named Finn Theiss, who had a long-ago affair with the sharpshooter Annie Oakley. In trying to understand how he got here, Hayward begins to untangle the convoluted estrangement between these two, and confronts the possibility that Annie Oakley is in fact his great-grandmother. The author includes beautifully woven-in excerpts from Oakley’s autobiography that have never appeared in book form. Goodbye, Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful and bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly sad book about the American dream coming to the end of the line.

Brumbaugh writes with the exquisite, tossed-off precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends. Readers of Michael Cunningham, Rick Moody, Leonard Michaels, and Jeffrey Eugenides will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice–and this new take on coming-of-age while fervently reckoning with the past.

Praise

“A dreamy, half-stoned novel woven from autobiographical warp and fictional weft. . . . Brumbaugh has a witness’s acuity for detail, and his matter-of-fact prose is sprinkled with sharp-grain recall of little truths. . . . Like other novels with biographical components (think Flaubert’s Parrot), its gamble of semifactual structure pays off. . . . Beautifully captures the wrung-out feel of a depleted American century.” –Violet Carberry, Baltimore City Paper

“Goodbye, Goodness is the rock “n” roll Great Gatsby. The American dream, slaughtered during the indie-rock nineties by an author who lived it. . . . Brumbaugh’s a new voice–witty, smart, jaded and fresh, and his book brings together the hopeful and the lost, the reality and the dream, the humor found in desperation, and the other way around.