<DIV>Hayward Theiss is on the lam, hiding out in a Malibu beach house that is not his and trying to figure out how he got there. A car crash, a bag of dope, a sinister producer, and his best friend's strange escape from rehab all complicate matters further. But in trying to understand his circumstances, Hayward begins to untangle the convoluted affair and subsequent estrangement between his great-grandfather, the massively ambitious robber baron Finn Theiss, and sharpshooter Annie Oakley. The author, a relative of Annie Oakley himself, weaves in beautiful excerpts from Oakley's autobiography that have never appeared in book form. Brumbaugh writes with the exquisite, tossed-off precision of a master chef preparing an early dinner for friends. Readers of Michael Cunningham, Rick Moody, Leonard Michaels, and Jeffrey Eugenides will be thrilled at the arrival of this new voice—and this new take on coming-of-age while fervently reckoning with the past. Goodbye, Goodness is a simultaneously hopeful and bleakly realistic, hilarious, and devastatingly sad book about the American dream coming to the end of the line.</div>