Eli Gottlieb
(William Morrow, 2008)

This canny potboiler about the shock waves of an unexpected death has its creaky moments, but on the whole it is a piercing evocation of the enervation and essential loneliness of domestic life. Nick Framingham is a plodding, small-town, middle-management type whose friendship with Rob Castor, a Jay McInerney-like literary prodigy, has provided him with vicarious thrills since childhood. Rob’s sudden reappearance in Nick’s life sets off a landslide of recrimination that gradually accumulates the sinister momentum of a nightmare.

In its structure and tone, Now You See Him at times echoes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—not a lucky comparison for most novels—but Gottlieb’s talent is for unmasking the fatal chinks in lives glamorous and humdrum alike. Nick’s self-absorption and limited powers of observation are the linchpins of his demise, yet Gottlieb’s characterization is almost entirely without the self-pity that mars many such first-person constructs. The homoerotic subtext of the relationship between the novel’s protagonist and his shadowy counterpart would have benefited from a more daring exposition, and at times the novel’s mechanics stretch credibility. Those criticisms aside, however, Now You See Him builds an absorbing and even tender narrative out of a sordid web of disaster.

From The Brooklyn Rail (March 2008)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.