The American Family of Tomorrow

In 1976, Bellwether needed a family to sell the future. The Kovacs were poor, photogenic, and available. For forty dollars and seven meal vouchers, they posed in a department-store window as The American Family of Tomorrow. Then the city built that future over the street where they lived. Thirty years later, failed installation artist Nina Salo finds one of the mannequins in a police training basement, its throat and chest marked by bullets. She follows the fake family through a church coat room, a punk house, a school assembly, a museum, a thrift-store nativity, and a suburban garage. When Nina rebuilds the display inside the condemned Harkness store, an old man appears outside the glass. "My family," he says. "I know them." The American Family of Tomorrow is a darkly comic literary suspense novel about memory, poverty, art, betrayal, urban renewal, and the copies that survive after the people are gone.