Zach Vowell

Silent Jubilees Zach Vowell

Anniversary parties, family reunions, and other similar gatherings thrive on a network of little conflicts. Here, conflicts, and joys for that matter, ride underneath the surface of our interactions with others, so secret that only God could know the complexity behind the simplest of hellos. Silent Jubilees touches on these kinds of experiences through the lives of the Hughes family, struggling to commune under unsettling circumstances in Texas, California, and roads in between. Featuring a narrator who becomes obsessed with the conflicts, joys, and family gatherings of the Hughes family, Silent Jubilees investigates with quasi-scholarly flare a two-week period in the Hughes's lives. Even as plans for Walter, famous maverick architect, and Hilda's fiftieth wedding jubilee are underway in Santa Barbara, Walter is fired from a tenured professorship. Meanwhile in Austin, his grandson Xavier, deceptively kept unaware of the jubilee, prepares to visit Los Angeles for a handball tournament the weekend before the anniversary (handball being the family sport of choice). Xavier's parents, Stearns and Penny, enlist his brother, Delmore, to keep the jubilee a secret as the brothers and Xavier's girlfriend, Ana, travel to California for the tournament. Further deceptions abound as the tournament and anniversary party near, and the narrator simultaneously tracks Walter's behavior as it descends into recklessness. Soon, the architect is implicated in the illegal detonation of his past buildings, including his house, where the jubilee takes place. Inside these pages lie ambition, unpleasant fulfillment, deception with good intentions, athletic chicanery, the need to be remembered, youthful indifference, food, and more all wrapped up in a history of events that never were.