The Season at Pelican's Rest: A Novel of Sun, Schemes, and Peacocks

Theodore Ashworth has, through no effort whatsoever, achieved a life that makes essentially no demands. Then his phone rings, and the display says CHIP.When the display says CHIP at nine-fourteen on a Tuesday morning, you are not receiving a casual inquiry about lunch. You are receiving the opening move of something larger. The something larger is Pelican's Rest - twelve thousand square feet of crumbling 1925 Mediterranean Revival on South Ocean Boulevard, which Teddy's oldest friend has decided to rescue from financial ruin by converting it into a boutique event venue. There is a plan. There is a very large spreadsheet, built by Chip's formidable sister Caroline, who Teddy has not seen in eight years and has been carefully not thinking about. There is a roof that has reached the philosophical limit of patching, a ballroom floor with opinions, a peacock that adopts the wrong man, and an aunt who controls the family trust and would like to know what, exactly, Teddy thinks he is doing. What Teddy is doing - though it takes him a season to notice - is becoming, for the first time in his life, useful. The Season at Pelican's Rest is a comic novel about old friends, faded grandeur, schemes that almost work, and the particular Florida light in which a man of leisure discovers he might, against all expectation, be good at something. For readers of P.G. Wodehouse, David Sedaris, and the sun-warmed social comedies of Carl Hiaasen and Maria Semple.