April 2008
Time Out - Books
Now You See Him
by Eli Gottlieb; William Morrow, 2008
Growing up, Rob Castor was the popular kid. A golden boy with irresistible charisma, everyone knew he would succeed. Unsurprisingly, Rob soon leaves his small hometown of Monarch, New York, to become a successful author and society darling in New York City. This perfect life comes to an abrupt end when Rob murders his writer-girlfriend before shooting himself.
Now You See Him is told from the point of view of Nick Framingham, one of Rob’s childhood friends who never made it out of Monarch. Stuck in a miserable marriage, he grows obsessed with nostalgia and the circumstances of his celebrity friend’s murder and suicide. Nick’s sudden fixation on the past, however, stirs up new and troubling questions regarding his own life. In
Now You See Him, Gottlieb winningly blends a mystery with the tale of an ugly, unraveling marriage. Evocatively written, the novel gamely asks the questions: How well do we know anyone? How well do we know ourselves?
Beautiful Children
by Charles Bock; Random House, 2008
One Saturday night, Newell Ewing—a hyperactive 12-year-old boy with a comic-book obsession—disappears after making his first visit to a Las Vegas casino with his socially awkward older friend Kenny. The story of
Beautiful Children sets in a year after Newell’s disappearance. Orbiting around the central mystery of the boy’s whereabouts are a web of tortured characters: Newell’s distraught parents, clinging onto a fraught but tender marriage; the aspiring comic-book artist Kenny, whose behavior on the night in question dogs his conscience; Bing Beiderbixxe, the sad-sack professional inker Kenny admires; a stripper Bing falls for; the stripper’s heavily pierced would-be pornographer boyfriend Ponyboy; and the adolescent misfit infatuated with Ponyboy, known to the reader only as “the girl with the shaved head.”
Beautiful Children is a searing portrayal of an almost mythically depraved Las Vegas and an attack on a pressing and complex issue: the dissolution of family and its effect on children.
Yalo
by Elias Khoury; Archipelago Books, 2008
During the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, a young man named Yalo is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut. After he is imprisoned for theft and rape, it soon becomes clear that his interrogator is interested not just in his real felonies. Yalo also is pressured to admit to misdoings—like planting bombs—that he has not committed. Almost without preamble, Yalo gives us the successive and contradictory confessions of the young prisoner, with constant interruptions from the interrogator, threatening torture if Yalo doesn’t tell “the truth.” Like Scheherezade in
A Thousand and One Nights, Yalo spins a new tale each day to stay alive. Through it all,
Yalo’s confessional format precludes any judgement of moral superiority, while challenging the reader to find new interpretations for the man’s story: A victimizer of his countrymen, he is also a victim of torture himself. <<<
