The highlights of Randy Kennedy’s résumé—23 years writing for the New York Times and, currently, a prestigious-sounding gig as director of special projects for the art gallery Hauser & Wirth—are worlds away from the circumstances of his raising: the University of Texas at Austin grad spent his childhood in the tiny Panhandle town of Plains. Those rural roots run deep in Kennedy’s debut novel, Presidio (Touchstone, August 21), which follows a car thief named Troy Falconer as he embarks on a desperate road trip from his fictionalized Panhandle hometown of New Cona to the titular Presidio. In a recent conversation, Kennedy described the real-life experiences that informed his vivid evocations of the places that Troy passes through as he drives south and west toward the book’s grim conclusion.
Click through the gallery to see Troy's journey.
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
New Cona/Plains: Troy’s hometown is based on my hometown, Plains, a cotton-farming and oil town of about 1,400 people. I grew up right at the edge of town, where I could walk out to a nearby pasture and find Comanche arrowheads. Plains is a really arid place—it’s not just a difficult place to farm, it’s a pretty difficult place to live. The characters in the book ask themselves, “Why did white people put their finger on the map and say, ‘This is where I’m going to stay’?”
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
Unidentified Rest Area Between Brownfield and Tahoka: This desolate rest stop is drawn from my memories of passing countless rest areas out in this treeless landscape where you never saw anyone sitting. It was like there was some regulation that said, “Every 75 miles there needs to be a rest stop.” And so they would just plunk one down right where you would never want to eat or have a Coke. I remember, as a kid, thinking, “Who would ever want to stop there?”
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
Cedar Lake: Sandhill cranes are these big, gorgeous birds that alight on that lake every year. I went hunting there once when I was a teenager with some friends, and it’s kind of a horrifying memory to me now—when you shot a bird and it came down, it sounded like a human hitting the ground.
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
Kermit: I know all of the towns from Amarillo to Midland, because I was a high school football player, and that area is where we went for games. I also knew some of them through my dad, who was a telephone lineman. He and my brother and I would ride around in his pickup so he could fix a telephone line or some buried cable that had been cut by a plow.
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
Balmorhea: The motel in this scene is a sort of concatenation of a lot of really crappy motels that I have known in my life, mostly from my childhood, from when we were driving across the country. My family usually stayed in decent motels, but there would be times when you’d drive all day and you’d end up in the middle of Utah or Arizona just having to stay in the place that had a vacancy. And occasionally these places would be pretty nasty.
Illustration by Jean-Luc Bonifay
Presidio: When I was a Boy Scout, we would go down to that part of Texas, and it felt even emptier than the Panhandle. Most of the places I revisited when I was doing research for the book felt exactly like I remembered them. But the border—and this was way before Trump—felt more electrified and dangerous and crazy. There was kind of a sinister feeling that I didn’t really remember from when I was a kid.
