The Layout

<p>When a Depression-era southern town suffers a series of inexplicable tragedies life is interrupted for its denizens���including a womanizing mayor the abused wife of a sullen locomotive engineer an honest but compromised police chief a minister that seems to levitate a dying junk dealer a Black preacher caught between two worlds a brutal company guard a diminutive railroad executive and master manipulator and a group of church ladies prone to gossip.</p><p>Seventy years later in Southern California these stories are interwoven into the social trials of Taylor Bedskirt a solitary widower with an obsession for trains who falls desperately under the spell of an aggressive and careworn waitress earns cautious acclaim from like-minded enthusiasts and attempts to ward off a sister intent upon giving him a ���normal��� life.</p><p>What ensues is a trenchant and often humorous exploration of the fictions we create and how we come to believe them.</p>