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The Beautiful Urban Family of the Upper West Side

no-longer-and-not-yet**Attention Writers! Joanna Clapps Herman leads “How Life Becomes Fiction,” a craft talk, on Thursday, September 18. Details on our News and Events page.**

No Longer and Not Yet, by Joanna Clapps Herman, offers linked short stories about the city is at its best. The book teems with unique souls that somehow, serendipitously, come together in community, spin apart, find one another again. The Upper West Side is a world full of possibility in this collection, and Ms. Herman shows us how its denizens’ intimacies and adventures, their devotion to one another and to the place they call home, render the city not such a large place after all.

Unlike a lot of urban writers portraying individuals as the city’s central characters, Herman makes families New York’s foundation. Individuals often seek out the city in order to assert themselves, their capacity for making unique choices. Herman’s families build urban lives to reveal that while strong individuals remain unique, they are willing to limit individual freedoms for the sake of loving relationship. In the book’s central series of stories, Tess and Max fall in love, marry, and raise their son Paul to the brink of high school graduation, with sweetly understated drama.

The first of the collection’s title sequence of stories, “No Longer,” has Tess proposing to Max. “All her life Tess had been waiting for fate to arrive on winged feet with a whir and a portentous breeze placing before her what her life would be about… Was Max her winged fate or a disturbance in the weather? Tess wasn’t sure. She knew she could not let the winds blow past her this time.” In the second, “Not Yet,” Tess considers leaving Max, who refuses to father another child after the failure of his first marriage. But when he confesses that he cannot bear losing her, and decides another child will be worth it if she will only stay, Tess meets him with uncertainty.

“Oh Max, we haven’t figured out how to be married. How can we have a baby?

“Oh, we’ll make a mess. I promise. The kid will wonder how we ever had the nerve to think we could be parents. My daughter will explain what a bad deal it’s getting. She’ll write a song about it. It will be broadcast on the radio.”

…Tess considered this, considered the currents of her husband’s weather flowing over her.

Not every family in No Longer Not Yet falls into Tess and Max’s more or less traditional patterns. Naomi, an artist, has a child with Eliot, then grows into a strong single mother. David and Sophie, immersed in intriguing professional lives, wrestle with whether to have children at all. Leah and Aaron navigate precarious parenting waters as their troubled preteen daughter appears to reject her new baby brother. Ambitious, brilliant Esther juggles marital infidelity, motherhood, weight issues, and chronic quitter’s syndrome during years of psychotherapy, in “Taking an Incomplete,” the collection’s most volatile story. In Esther, the struggle of the individual within the family bubbles closest to the surface, threatens to explode the family’s carefully tended order.

Herman touches on a universal nerve by setting these stories in the city, where individuality crosses into psychosis in characters like the homeless Flower Lady and the cardboard-box hermit, tended to by Leah in “Seeding Memory” and “Snow Struck.” The family hovers in the balance between the individual’s desires for normalcy and uniqueness. As we step into maturity and head up families of our own, we often feel as if we are navigating those extremes exclusively: immerse ourselves in family and lose our individuality, reject the confines of family and lose our minds.

The families in No Longer Not Yet teeter as they walk that balance, but they do not fall. This is not a collection that explores disaster or abysmal loss. If anything, Herman explores the truths of what we perceive as urban success, normalcy, and individuality in a world where long-term relationship, the touchstone of humanity, is often hidden behind the heroic myths portrayed in news and popular media. No Longer Not Yet reveals the city as an unsensational, even sensible place, where families do what they do everywhere. Schedule work and play, juggle the nuts-and-bolts of daily life, and work hardest at feeding the love that brought them together in the first place.

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Love The Last Policeman!

DETECTIVE PALACE VERSUS ASTEROID MAIA
Ben H. Winters’ Award-Winning Last Policeman Novels

Congratulations to Ben H. Winters on the recent nomination of Countdown City, the second novel in the Last Policeman trilogy, for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award for science fiction! Last year, the first novel in the series won an Edgar for best original paperback in mystery and crime fiction. Both honors seem delightful to us, bright spots in a literary world where awards often go to novels that may be epic, meticulously crafted, relevant, or even stupefying, but not always… fun.

The Last Policeman books, so far, are fun!

As The Last Policeman opens in March, Detective Hank Palace is a cop’s cop, one of those rare men who rises each morning knowing exactly why he’s here. That virtue, however, is about to become irrelevant. Maia, a massive asteroid formerly known as 2011GV(sub 1), is predicted, with 100% certainty according to the mews media, to collide with Earth in October. Maia will probably not strike Hank’s home of Concord, New Hampshire dead-on, but her impact is predicted to eradicate life on earth as we know it. With 100% certainty. According to the news media.

Hank, like others around him, takes in this news with grave dismay as he is faced with yet another suicide investigation. But when he sees signs that foul play might have taken the life of Peter Zell, Hank never considers abandoning his job. Instead of rubber-stamping the file, he begins to ask questions. The answers, told over the course of a lively and tense story that’s peppered with wry humor, begin to reveal the rapid breakdown of human civilization in the growing shadow of Maia. What are the limits of human morality, and for what reasons will people resolve to break them?

In the background of the murder investigation, we learn that Hank has a sister, Nico. The two are bound by a tragic family history, driven apart by disparate natures. Nico is younger, quick and intuition-driven, while Hank is deliberate and circumspect. Nico has stepped to the fringes, along with a radical group that believes the Maia story is part of a government conspiracy. The asteroid’s path has been mischaracterized, or can be deflected. Hank rejects the movement–but what if they’re right?

As Countdown City opens, it is July. Maia’s impact is predicted to be less than 3 months away (yes, with 100% certainty). Greater questions arise. What are the limits of human fidelity, faith, and relationship, as civilization recedes into feudal mistrust? The formerly sophisticated global marketplace collapses into local bartering circles. The network of human labor abandons its posts on the power and technology grids. Small, tight communities war with each other for water, food and security. Nico’s faction, for instance, fashions itself as a scouting arm for the Free Republic, a group of students occupying the former University of New Hampshire campus. An escape community called The World of Tomorrow advertises its luxury mountain stronghold to frightened people of means.

The suicide trend has not abated, and Hank is faced with another disappearance. Was Brett Cavatone, ex-cop and devoted husband to Hank’s childhood friend Martha, a victim of foul play, or has he simply “gone bucket-list,” along with the millions of others who have run away to formerly forbidden loves, pleasures, missions, false promises of salvation?

Winters, who earned acclaim for the his spoof-classics Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, writes solid, entertaining crime fiction, infused with his own quirky perspective on the world. Hank Palace is a decent guy, a maddeningly dogged detective, the kind of hero that takes the case of a little boy’s missing toy sword as seriously as the case of a man gone bucket-list. He’s also human enough to fall in love, once or twice, and to maintain a fierce devotion to his only sister, despite the abysmal differences that drive them apart. And he’s unable to do less than his best, even when that is completely, humanly inadequate to prevent the end of the world. What more could anyone ask of a person?

Pick up both paperback originals for a satisfying pre-apocalyptic read, and join us in eagerly awaiting the final installment, World of Trouble, rumored for a summer release!

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Fall for Giants

Fall in the North Atlantic U.S. is the perfect time and place to read Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach–over a long weekend, or a chapter at a time as the days shorten and the early evenings chase you to bed. This easy-paced yet structurally complex novel is laced with just enough bittersweet regret to perfectly complement the turning leaves. There’s plenty of action and intrigue here for thriller fans, yet also a thoughtful set of intertwining character journeys through relationship, football, haute cuisine, dance, 1970s nostalgia, (and yes, even some surprisingly decent sex) that will appeal to the more literary-leaning.

David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is a charming Princeton-bound high school football player who seems to have it all: golden good looks, devoted power-set parents, and a ticket to the Ivy League. He shares a pond in his Connecticut backyard with rock star Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his enchanting wife, the world-famous ballet dancer Sylphide.  His fiery sister, Kate, is both goddess and puzzle to him. When Lizard’s parents are murdered under suspicious circumstances, he and Kate experience a seismic shift that will drive them to seek answers for the rest of their lives. Roorbach weaves together decades’ worth of these larger-than-life personalities to uncover the secrets and foibles that might shed light on the double murder.

Lizard shares his love for good and wholesome food, down and dirty football, and brilliant, artistic women throughout with a charm that belies the trouble and grief driving his life. On occasion the ease with which he and his fellow characters fall into fame and prestigious positions comes across as unbelievable. Lizard follows up his tenure as a third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins in their heyday, for instance, with not one but two acclaimed gourmet restaurants, though his only training at cooking came from a long-term Southern girlfriend who taught him decent barbecue. His true love, Emily, rises to immediate fame as an international dance star under Sylphide’s tutelage–while Lizard gets his intimate turn, over the years, with both fabulous women.

But in portraying these lives in the spectacular way he does, Roorbach wisely taps into our delight with romantic and ambitious fantasy. He does it skillfully, too, engaging modern readers with modern issues and modern-seeming characters inhabiting a pop culture world of the past. He opts for a multi-cultural, multi-sexual, and even cross-gender cast of characters, keeping the dialogue highly entertaining as well as relevant in our world of ever-brightening awareness to global human issues, from gender consciousness to bad banks to Lizard’s foodie obsession with mushrooms.

Life Among Giants is a sprawling, fun, and rich novel, deserving of the praise it received on its release from both the New York Times and The Washington Post. Just like the season of fall–all this, and football too.

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Rambling Through “&Sons” by David Gilbert

 

&SonsWade into &Sons, the epic New York novel by David Gilbert, with both eyes open. For one thing, you don’t want to miss a single beautiful turn of phrase, and the characters’ portraits, with the possible exception of young Andy Dyer, who is simply a “likable bastard,” to quote the New York Times, are as close to flawlessly drawn as you will find. For another, it’s easy to lose the story in that lovely language. You have to pay attention. Except for the beauty of Gilbert’s prose, you may wonder why the novel fills over 400 pages. But much of this story, especially the portraits and the masterfully drawn New York tableaux, will stay with you long after you close the book: the mark of a good read.

&Sons, Gilbert’s second novel, revolves around the family of A.N. Dyer, known as Andrew, an aging celebrity novelist who appears modeled after several real-life curmudgeonly, reclusive writers of the last century. Most reviewers recall J.D. Salinger, but Dyer has been significantly more prolific, publishing 16 acclaimed novels spanning 30+ years. We meet Andrew at the funeral of his oldest friend, Charlie Topping, whose son, Philip, tells the tale. Andrew is in his twilight years. Andrew’s obsession, seemingly in response to Charlie’s death, is twofold: recreate the first draft of his seminal first novel, Ampersand, and recreate his family with a desperate call to sons Richard and Jamie for a reunion in New York City.

Andrew’s youngest son, Andy, only seventeen, is the delight of his eyes–and also, unfortunately, the child of an extramarital relationship, painted rather fantastically as the writer’s love affair with himself (the details which are one of the oddest surprises in the novel). Andy’s birth estranged Andrew from his wife and two older children, but it is the loyal Philip who is treated as an outsider, though he grew up alongside the Dyer boys. Philip has struggled all his life to understand why this should be so. In the wake of his father’s death, he pores over Andrew and Charlie’s lifelong mysterious and intimate correspondence, which seems to hold the key.

&Sons has been characterized by New York author Fran Lebowitz as “a New York novel written by an actual New Yorker.” If you add to this that Gilbert is a repeat New Yorker fiction writer, you will have an idea of the his level of artistry, and of the attitudes that direct his voice. Scenes such as Andy and his cousin Emmett pursuing a favorite pretzel vendor through Central Park, or a flirting girl texting Andy to find her near a nameless work of art in the Metropolitan Museum, define this novel’s world, as do scenes that take place outside of New York City. Reality filmmaker Jamie Dyer sojourning to a midnight country graveyard in Vermont, the resting place of his high school sweetheart, reformed drug addict Richard Dyer aping the attitudes of his adopted sun-drenched west-coast lifestyle, play up New York’s central role in this well-wrought world–no other place seems quite so real. The city is venerable, unapologetic, and grand, harboring lovely secrets like a nest of red-tailed hawks near Central Park, or the owner of a neighborhood burger joint who never forgets the face of an old customer, even when one returns as a tormented artist, or burnished with an L.A. tan.

Absolutely worth relishing the melange of character and evocative tableaux in &Sons, but don’t measure it too closely with your plot-mapper.

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CP Book Club Tackles Oates’ The Accursed

The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates
The Accursed, by Joyce Carol Oates

All honor and praise to Joyce Carol Oates.  We expect that if science can accomplish such things and she is willing, her brain will one day be among the most valuable relics to grace a Princeton University pickle jar.

We are all glad that we read The Accursed.  One member even loved it (I consider it important to note that this particular member just finished writing a 450-page novel herself, and happily wallowed through Oates’ 600-plus pages within a week or so).  Some of us are just wired for gothic, labyrinthine sentences, language so rich it leaves a coating on your brain, and story so wildly crafted that you can’t see to the edges of its vast universe.

The Accursed traces the lives of Princeton, New Jersey’s upper class during the reign of a bloody and unspeakable curse.  Is Annabelle Slade the victim of her own twisted appetites, or bewitched by a demon?  Was Professor Pearce Van Dyck cuckolded by the same demon,his child a changeling, or is he a madman, his child a bastard?  And why is it–Count English Von Gneist by some accounts favors the look of the sinister Axson Mayte, yet others see in him a saint or a god?  For good measure, Oates throws in the question of whether young author Upton Sinclair will starve himself and his new family to death in horror over the state of the meatpacking industry. See?  The Accursed is not for the reader who likes to know, once and for all, what the heck is going on here.

We all agreed that, in addition to being wild and rich and gothic-labarynthine, The Accursed is masterfully written.  Scary-masterful.  Oates is clearly in a class beyond even the gifted among us, and her work destined to outlive most.

We also discovered, thanks to our attentive facilitator (we have been rotating facilitators so far–much more fun than having a single maven), that The Accursed is actually the fifth in a series of gothic novels by Oates.  This reassured me, as a reader, since the story did appear to take rather odd turns, which I now believe are resolutions of earlier plot-lines.  The rambling oddness was not out of place, but reading 600-plus pages of considerable oddness did make me scratch my head at times.

The verdict: the beauty of this book is that you can read it either as a weird, fantastic tale, a literary gross-out of a thick summer read; or as a shape-shifting parable in which the upper class may be taking some deserved medicine for the horrors they and their monstrous appetites have visited upon others.  For sure, The Accursed is huge, it’s dense, and it’s not for the faint of heart.

FALL BOOK CLUB PICK: THE ROUND HOUSE BY LOUISE ERDRICH!