The Astral : a novel /

The wife of Kate Christensen's hero throws him out for adultery he never committed. LATELY the realist novel's been getting realistic. Originally developed in response to a highfalutin form gone stale, realism has a long and glorious tradition of extraordinary yarns about ordinary people. But the name "realism" was never quite right. Authors as disparate as Mark Twain, Émile Zola and Edith Wharton are called "realists," which would be fitting if you spent your adolescence drifting down the Mississippi, worked out your love problems by drowning your rival and attempted suicide by sled. In later years, however, realism has been tailored to more closely fit its title, and it now largely relates the tales of ordinary people not in extraordinary circumstances but in ordinary ones. Modernism basically started this off, with a man bumming around Dublin or a woman buying flowers for a party serving as a framework for far-flung experiments of language and consciousness. There have been wonderful, wonderful books of modern realism - I'd like to pause here to light a candle for the much missed Laurie Colwin - but it's tricky to pull off. Kate Christensen's new novel, "The Astral," is an object lesson on the current realist novel, with its pitfalls and pleasures both as clear as the book's unsentimental vision. "The Astral" is about Harry Quirk, a poet whose wife suspects him, incorrectly, of having an affair. She throws him out of their apartment and destroys his work in progress, sending Quirk into the streets of Brooklyn. He walks the neighborhoods. He drinks at bars. And he checks in with friends and family, who all have problems of their own. His best friend (and supposed lover) is a widow learning to move on. His daughter has become a freegan, meaning she Dumpster-dives for food and furniture, and his son has joined a Christian cult. Quirk gets a job, and then another one; he gets an apartment, and then another one; and he misses, first fiercely and then less so, his seething wife. This is the plot, such as it is, but plot's not really the point here. "The Astral" is structured as a journey - a poet's trip through an interior and exterior landscape - and Christensen manages each step with quiet deliberation: "I walked with my head down toward Greenpoint Avenue. It was slightly warmer out here than it had been the night before, and the wind had died away to nothing. A bird chirped from God knew what tree. A cat slunk through the gutter past me, intent on breakfast. Bird and cat and I were alone out here, greeting the day together." The language is like this throughout - plain, plain, plain - and it's nice to see an interior novel that reins it in a little. But as I often feel on Greenpoint Avenue, I'm not sure where we're going, exactly. I like that bird in "God knew what tree." But in so careful a paragraph, what's with the flat, extraneous phrases like "the wind had died away to nothing" or that "intent on breakfast," tucked unnecessarily into that lone, stark cat? It may be nitpicky to dwell on the description of the landscape when Christensen's attention is elsewhere. The novel's title, for instance, is taken from the name of the apartment building where Quirk and his wife have lived. But the author makes no hay with its metaphorical, metaphysical implications. Instead, the book tracks Quirk's internal journey. His primary concern is his wife, Luz, who he tells us early on "has a cold, impeccable exterior inside which beats a soul as fragile and silken and easily crushed as a baby mouse. The contradiction is lethal, maddening and lovely." (Fragile and easily crushed? Stop nitpicking.) Toward the close of the novel, when he and Luz finally have a substantial conversation, he's more blunt: "I finally got it through my head that you're a controlling, closed-off, lethally angry bitch, and nothing I do is ever going to please you." Moving from "lethal" to "lethally" doesn't seem like he's traveled so far. Of course, it is usually the case in a first-person narrative that there's some distance between what is actually going on and what the narrator tells us. But nowhere in "The Astral" does Christensen give us anything to indicate we should take Quirk's narration at anything other than face value. It's bracing, at a time swimming with unreliable narrators, to have a narrator who is consistently reliable, but after a while one can't help wondering where the narrative tension is supposed to come from. "She was a common blue-eyed blonde of a type I'd never found appealing," Quirk says of another character, "self-serious but not intelligent, self-possessed but not noble, charismatic but not profound," and there's nothing to tell us otherwise. Christensen has Quirk say that not to indicate anything about his state of mind, but because the woman in question is, in fact, all of those adjectives. With every stop on the journey, Christensen adopts this strategy, backgrounding plot and character elements in favor of ordinary statements we're meant to take as plain truth. Quirk meets a new woman only to hear her say, "Women want attention, we want closeness, whether we admit it or not." He sees his son perform in a cult ritual only to be told, "I was a soul in the wilderness, crying out, and now I've found my true home." And when Quirk and his supposed lover, Marion, meet for drinks, to talk over his shattered marriage and their own fraught friendship, this is what they have to say: "'You think we were afraid of each other?' "'We were afraid of ourselves.' "'Who's writing this dialogue?' I said. Neither of us laughed. Our new pints of foamy beer arrived. We each took a good pull and set them back down at the same identical instant. 'Have we talked enough about this?' I said. "'Not quite,' she said." It is indeed realistic that they'd keep talking, as barroom conversations tend to ramble on. But in a novel it feels distancing. And so, to close the gap between myself and the people I was reading about, I finished "The Astral" in a bar. The last 50 pages ran a little smoother, and the final scene - stark and disconnected from the narrative, without Quirk telling us what he thinks of it - had a rosy glow I wish I'd found more of in the rest of the book. Still, though, that glow was probably my second bourbon. I'm used to thinking of novels as inducing their own enchantments, rather than enhancing the ones we already have with us. But by its very nature, the realist novel believes that we are, all of us ordinary people in our ordinary lives, enchanted already. I believe this too, which is why I like to stop reading from time to time and look around at my circumstances. But then when I open a novel, I expect something other than the ordinary circumstances that already surround me, be it in language or story. I think most readers do. To expect otherwise, as Christensen does in "The Astral," seems a little, well, unrealistic. The narrator's estranged wife has a soul 'as fragile and silken and easily crushed as a baby mouse.' Daniel Handler is the author of the novel "Adverbs" and, as Lemony Snicket, "A Series of Unfortunate Events."

The latest by Christensen (The Great Man, 2007) introduces wordy poet-narrator Harry Quirk as a man on the brink of losing his wife, Luz, who kicked him out and destroyed every trace of his latest manuscript, and thusly his entire life in the Astral, the giant old memory-cavern of a building in Brooklyn where they've spent their lives together. Luz, wrongly convinced Harry's been sleeping with his female best friend, is irate and implacable despite Harry's earnest attempts to prove his innocence and continued love for her. Homeless, jobless, and disbelieved by most everyone, Harry begins to take charge of his life in a way he clearly never had to before, getting a crummy job and committing to, with his daughter, rescuing his son from the apparent cult he's joined. A developed cast of characters, not the least of which is Brooklyn itself, populates the narrative, and it comes as somewhat of a relief when Harry realizes he'. become unspeakably, pun intended, bored by the sound and sight of my own poetic voice. A satisfying redoing of a man undone.--Bostrom, Anni. Copyright 2010 Booklist

Like the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn of its setting, Christensen's unremittingly wonderful latest (after Trouble) is populated by an odd but captivating mix of characters. At the center is Harry Quirk, a middle-aged poet whose comfortable life is upended one winter day when his wife, Luz, convinced he's having an affair, destroys his notebooks, throws his laptop from the window, and kicks him out. Things, Harry has to admit, are not going well: their idealistic Dumpster-diving daughter, Karina, is lonely and lovelorn, and their son, Hector, is in the grip of a messianic cult. Taking in a much-changed Greenpoint, Brooklyn, while working at a lumberyard and hoping to recover his poetic spark, Harry must come to terms with the demands of starting anew at 57. Astute and unsentimental, at once romantic and wholly rational, Harry is an everyman adrift in a changing world, and as he surveys his failings, Christensen takes a singular, genuine story and blows it up into a smart inquiry into the nature of love and the commitments we make, the promises we do and do not honor, and the people we become as we negotiate the treacherous parameters of marriage and friendship and parenthood. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Christensen (Trouble, 2009, etc.) knows her way around aging characters. Having won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her lively septuagenarians inThe Great Man (2007), she now creates a charmingly ribald bohemian poet flailing about in late middle age.The title refers to the apartment building where Harry Quirk and his wife Luz, a devoutly Catholic Mexican nurse, have lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for all of their 30-year marriage. Now Luz has kicked Harry out and burnt his latest manuscript of poetryeschewing popular trends, he writes in rhyme and meterbecause she thinks his love poems are proof that he's been carrying on an affair with his friend Marion. Righteously claiming the poems are written to an imaginary woman, he fights hard to convince Luz of his fidelity and win her back. Meanwhile, he hangs out in his Greenpoint neighborhood, finds work at a Hasidic lumberyard where he's the only non-Jew, drinks at his local bars, visits Marion and discusses why they have never been and never will be lovers and moves from living space to living space until he ends up staying with his daughter Karina, a 25-year-old vegan dumpster-diving activist. He and Karina make visits to Karina's older brother Hector, always Luz's favorite, who has abandoned her Catholicism and joined a Christian cult led by a sexy charlatan who plans to marry Hector. While Harry wanders through his days, drinking, conversing, picking fights, trying to talk to Luz, who says she wants a divorce and won't see him, his Brooklyn world of aging bohemians comes vividly to life. There's not a lot of active plot here, but each minor character is a gem. As for Harry, by the time he faces the truth about his marriage and finds a measure of hard-earned happiness, or at least self-awareness, he has won the reader's heart. He's a larger-than-life, endearing fool.A masterpiece of comedy and angst. Think Gulley Jimson of Joyce Cary'sThe Horses Mouthtransported from 1930s London to present-day Brooklyn.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.