Alternative Atlanta (2005)

Marshall Boswell's first novel was published by Delacorte in February 2005. In Atlanta in the summer of the 1996 Olympics, Gerald Brinkman, thirty, reviews basement rock bands for an alternative paper, and his brilliant, vagabond father, Paul, arrives to stay with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis and, in the jacket's words, an unbearable confession to make. (Open Library)

Watches

Swatch watch: At Centennial Olympic Park, told that the Swatch attraction is just an elaborate commercial for Swatch watches, Paul says he will buy one then and lets the others go on (p. 188). He comes back fresh from the Swatch Watch World of Time with a brand-new lime-green plastic watch with a yellow peace sign and no hands, which he calls the Swatch Watch Timeless Time Peace; Sasha presses the button on the side and the peace sign dissolves into a pixelled facsimile of an old watch face with Roman numerals (p. 192). He later asks Gerald to meet him at the pavilion at one in the morning, where he bought it (p. 249). The model name is the novel's. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: "Relative, mostly. But I got a nice watch." He proudly displays a brand-new lime-green plastic timepiece with a yellow peace sign on the face. There is neither a minute nor an hour hand. Just the peace sign. (Marshall Boswell, Alternative Atlanta, scan cataloged as Delacorte Press, 2004 (copyright 2005; A Delacorte Book, February 2005), p. 192; Internet Archive scan OCR)