American purgatorio /

A man's life changes forever when he walks out of a gas station and into a convenience store. His waiting wife has vanished, and the narrator's life takes on a new quest--to find her.\b So begins Haskell's first novel, and the nameless narrator begins a winding journey in search of his lost wife and for his former life. From a leafy block in Brooklyn to the beaches of Southern California, he searches desperately, and his journey is both heroic and heartbreaking. His peregrinations are linked to the seven deadly sins, and he encounters a strange cast of characters until he arrives, brokenhearted and broke, on the beaches of San Diego. What he discovers along the way is that memory is often selective and revelatory, that strangers are not always kind (but they often are), and that life-changing experiences (good and bad) can be just around the corner. Haskell's short story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollack (2003)\b received praise, and his first novel is equally laudable. --Michael Spinella Copyright 2004 Booklist

A man scrutinizes what it means to live and love during a cross-country search for his missing wife in a prickly, penetrating novel by the author of I Am Not Jackson Pollock. After stopping for gas on his way to his mother-in-law's house, the narrator, Jack, emerges from a convenience store to find that his car and his wife, Anne, are nowhere to be found. After making his way back home, Jack discovers a U.S. map marked with an apparent route; imagining that this will lead him to his wife, he buys another car and sets off. Haskell twists the essential mystery-what happened to Anne?-into a meticulous, probing investigation of one man's desires, fears and coping mechanisms, a tactic that somewhat slows the narrative but results in existential chewiness. As Jack makes his way to Kentucky, Colorado, California, he encounters odd but sympathetic strangers, many of whom are likewise journeying, most of whom aid him and some of whom seem like reflections of himself. The cool, intentionally deadened prose can make for difficult reading; that Haskell turns the notion of the unreliable narrator on its head not once but twice will redeem everything for some readers and make others feel tricked. Chapters named for the seven deadly sins (in Latin) signal Jack's path through pride and sloth, through a world that feels both banally familiar and utterly alien-an American purgatory-in this strange and compelling novel. Agent, Derek Johns at A.P. Watt (London). (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This first novel by the author of the story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock has a riveting beginning: the narrator walks out of a service center on a New Jersey parkway to discover that his wife, Anne, has disappeared in their car. Unable to wait for an explanation, he purchases a used car from a neighbor and begins a journey from New York to San Diego that is dictated by coincidence and his determined belief that Anne is still alive. Each chapter is loosely based on one of the seven deadly sins and levels from Dante's Purgatorio and is populated by various characters, especially women who have some mystical relationship to Anne that the narrator tries to interpret. The tone becomes foreboding as he struggles to define reality and what inhabits only his imagination. "Like sunscreen," he reasons, "you have to put up a shield or membrane that keeps that side or that thought or that vision from disrupting what's on this side." Characters like the homeless beggar Polino and the complex and sometimes comical plot keep the reader glued to every page until the astonishing ending. Highly recommended.-David A. Berone, Univ. of New Hampshire Lib., Durham (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

First novel by storywriter Haskell (I Am Not Jackson Pollock, 2003), about a man's distraught search for his wife after she disappears from a New Jersey gas station. The narrator, an editor at a New York baby magazine, comes out of a gas station convenience store to discover that his wife, Anne, has disappeared in their car. She doesn't answer the cell phone. He goes home and listens to a message from his mother-in-law but can't get her on the phone when he calls back. The police say they can't help. He finds a map on which Anne has circled several cities, then he buys a used car from his friend Mike. Before leaving to follow the map's course, he wins a poker game with Mike's friends, and he also returns to the gas station, but no one is helpful. On the road to his first stop in Kentucky, he picks up a yoga-practicing hitchhiker who introduces him to his attractive roommate. He sees a maroon station wagon like Anne's and follows it to a motel, where he decides it isn't his car after all. In Boulder, he attends some kind of hippie celebration with a hitchhiking couple and has orgiastic sex with them before heading south. In Arizona, his car dies. He gets rid of it and gives away most of his belongings. His credit cards stop working. He becomes homeless. As he travels, he remembers, with more detail, the scene at the gas station before Anne disappeared. At first, all he remembers is another car nearby, then he remembers it hitting his car. Next, he remembers that Anne was killed, and then finally (as anyone who saw The Sixth Sense will have guessed long before) he realizes . . . something else. Overwrought, obvious, self-conscious: likely to be a big disappointment for fans of Haskell's often-brilliant stories. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.