Dreamland

A coming of age novel about a new college grad, Joe, working as a counterman in a classic American aluminum-skin diner named Dreamland in New Orleans, his girlfriends Lulu and Roxie, Dreamland's owner, Mr. Clarence, and a new life in the Big Easy, where a diner serves gourmet food at local low prices. No chicken-fried steak with white gravy, ever. The South, and yet not the South, a city whose heritage beside the Big Muddy is as mixed as its people, where there are dirty gangsters, dirtier cops, gorgeous babes, where you can drink on the street in a paper go-cup, and no one is named Bubba. Take a trip of love without much sentimentality, a boy becomes a man, a girl becomes a woman, a woman teaches a boy, and a man gets old and wise, with some mayhem along the way.