New York, New York : how the apartment house transformed the life of the city (1869-1930) /

An existential sadness pervades this affecting first collection of interlinked stories, which chronicle a man's attempts to take control of his life and his defeat at destiny's firm hands. We meet Dan Foley as a youngster accompanying his undertaker father ``on removal,'' during which he learns that death can reveal terrible secrets. In his subsequent misadventures, some inherently more dramatic than others, he grows up to become a Florida architect and the father of two children, yet still feels distant from his own experience. In ``Foley Returns'' a criminal cousin reaches across the years to remind Dan that the ``old routes of comfort'' and the ``soothing geography'' of family relations can simply disappear. But lessons always come too late, and he persists in trying to manipulate his fate. ``Foley's Motto'' shows him attempting to adhere to such vague maxims as ``love something'' and ``expect nothing,'' only to find that destiny has another idea--in this instance, divorce. Chiarella, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker , sets forth these hard truths in unvarnished, seemingly artless prose that assumes transcendent power. ( Sept. ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Chiarella chronicles the stages of his protagonist's life in a series of 11 short stories, ranging from childhood to old age. Dan Foley is an imaginative and somewhat eccentric character, not unlike John Irving's T.S. Garp. As a youth, he and his drunken brother Hank serve as indifferent apprentices in his father's mortuary. Neither son elects to take over the business. Hank leaves home without saying goodbye, creating a bit of a family schism, and Foley utimately graduates from the University of Florida with a degree in architecture. He meets Grace, his future wife, while working in a movie theater during college. They have two children, to whom Foley is devoted, and eventually divorce. A benign storyteller, Foley engages in lies and magical thinking, which sometimes get him into trouble. The tales of Foley (a.k.a. Berard) have appeared in The New Yorker , Story , and The Florida Review . Recommended for public libraries.-- Kimberly G. Allen, National Assn. of Home Builders Lib., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A first collection of 11 interrelated stories--about the coming of age and failure-ridden adulthood of a narcissistic Florida architect unable to finish anything. We meet Dan Foley in ``Foley's Escape Story'' when he experiences his ``first removal'' and embalming of a body with his undertaker father. ``Foley's Life Story'' takes this would-be hero to the University of Florida, where Foley's penchant to make things up, or to lie, about his life in order to improve upon it, reveals a pattern that will emerge more fully in later stories such as ``Rapture,'' in which Foley ``decides to do something about his lying'' before getting mixed up with an old man and a pumpkin and lying again. In ``Foley's Confessions,'' he meets his future wife, Grace, and spies on her, resulting in a catastrophe, but by ``Foley's Luck,'' he is married with children, bemoaning the day he killed a fox with his Chevy as the day his luck turned. Obsessed, he keeps a list of unlucky events until he has nearly driven his wife crazy and his friends away. In ``Foley's Motto,'' then, Grace has had enough of Foley's starts and stops. The two separate, and Foley begins a new life, one no more satisfying to him than the old one. In ``Foley's Avenger,'' his daughter runs off to a man, and Foley goes after her, once again reduced to voyeurism by story's end. Finally, in ``Foley the Great,'' Chiarella allows his hero a chance to tie up some loose ends and, famished for intimacy and closure, a chance to understand that, as an architect at least, he did manage to finish some things. The gimmicky structure wears thin, but, at best, a heartbreaking look at certain dramatized paucities of modern life.