In his debut novel, ''The Best People in the World," Justin Tussing achieves a significant literary feat, managing to keep the reader engaged while portraying lives characterized largely by idleness and inertia. Thomas, Alice, and self-proclaimed anarchist Shiloh Tanager settle into an abandoned house near Burlington, where at first they swim in ponds, plant a garden, and frolic in their newfound freedom.
But as happens for so many who try to escape the past, these three find their new life fraught with liabilities they didn't expect. The garden goes dry. When winter comes and their wood runs out, they resort to burning banisters and beds. To make a few bucks, Thomas is reduced to stealing Christmas trees from a local farmer, suffering a hatchet wound in the process.
As dire as their external circumstances are, however, it is desolation of an emotional nature that permeates the novel, which is written so beautifully as to make the reader forget that for chunks of the narrative, nothing happens. ''On sunny days, when we remembered, we opened the curtains to let in the light. At night, or when the sky was overcast, the curtains remained closed. Days passed unobserved," Thomas tells us.
Much of the book's action takes place inside his adolescent heart, which he remembers in retrospect from the vantage of the man he becomes. His affair with his 25-year-old teacher educates him in the feelings of desire and desperation: ''I wasn't on the run. Every moment with Alice I was home."
Shiloh Tanager, the third member of the fugitive triangle, brings them into contact with a band of people who live communally and refer to themselves as DWG (''Down with God"). They were once ''the best people in the world," Shiloh says, but now they include Parker, a compatriot of Shiloh's, who is such a dismal excuse for a human being that he inspires Thomas to wonder whether Shiloh's friends merely seek destruction, or if they actually cause it. In the end, Parker's relationship with Shiloh leads to a fatal event that may or may not be an accident, and to the end of the threesome's tenure as roommates, confidants, and fellow survivors.
