Montague Yazzo was once an ascendant football star. Now he’s a guy who’s moved back home, with a far quieter second act of his life to endure as he reflects on his past, his mother, his girlfriend, his uncle who’s disappeared, his community - as it expands, contracts and maddens with the times - the relationship between the ugly and the beautiful and, most basically, on the meaning of home itself. In the vein of EL Doctorow’s fictitious-historical Ragtime , the self-exploratory picaresque novels of Saul Bellow and the nouveau roman, Sunnyside tells the five-act story of one Westchester County resident at the turn of the twenty-first century and establishes Houghteling as one of the foremost explorers of the American lyric.