Split-levels

This quirky, funny, unsettling novel delivers its reader to that strangest of lands: the suburbs. When Allen Stanley's father is found dead in the bathtub, his wrists slashed, Allen is called back to the sleepy, sixties suburb where he grew up. But the simple matter of arranging the burial and settling the estate soon becomes a path into the shadowy, unspoken side of the life of the town. Allen is perplexed by the thick undercurrent of sexuality that marks his every encounter with the locals, first with the young housewife next door, then with the teenage girl who works at the local library,…