After all the good books I read in 2007, it was only inevitable that I should be in a reading funk in January and February. Every book I picked up felt like lead in my hands and a burden in my book bag. So it must be karma that once I find a good book, then a suite of good books follow. It's like that saying, "When it rains, it pours."
I picked up 5 books at the library recently and have been reading them in order of their size (small to large). Ellington Boulevard was my first.
This is the latest book by Chicagoan Adam Langer, who also wrote Crossing California. CC was one of the books I tried reading in January (as well as last year); it takes place in Chicago (Roger's Park) and for that reason you would think that I would plow through it, but that wasn't the case. As far as I read of this novel, it's 1979 Chicago and it chronicles the lives of some Jewish youths in Roger's Park during the span of the Iran hostage crisis. Maybe it was the characters, but I didn't like them enough to care and I didn't feel like reading it anymore.
Ellington Boulevard -- set in NYC and we know how I love NYC (read: hate NYC) books -- hit me in a completely opposite way. The characters were more caricatures, and I liked them a whole lot better. The plot is simple: Ike Morphy, a former Jazz clarinetist for the group the Funkshuns, and his dog Herbie Mann, live in a rent controlled apartment in an up-and-coming NY neighborhood. When the landlord dies and his son, Mark, inherits the building, he learns that Ike's been living there with a lease equal to a "handshake." That's when the new owner decides to sell the apartments so he start a chain of restaurants, but Ike's not making it easy for Mark or real estate broker Josh, especially when potential buyers Darrell and Rebecca come to look at it.
Rebecca is a new editor for a tanking magazine and her husband is a perpetual doctoral student and spends all day avoiding his dissertation and chasing after a pretty red-head he met in the library -- who has a story of her own. Each chapter tells a little more of each person's story and how all their lives in NYC are all intersecting through this one apartment.
The seller is a recovering addict who's trying to make over his life, but he's still pretty sleazy. The real estate broker is an aspiring actor who fell into the lucrative world of real estate. The mortgage broker opens a bottle of champagne whenever the economy reports job losses. The girlfriend is a writer who lost her creativity and now only writes stories like "This annoying guy is trying to pick me up in the library, what's up with that" -- or something like that.
The character list is unending and each is interesting - whether likable or not - in their own right. But Darrell had to be my favorite: the son of professor's in Madison, WI, he's the perpetual doctoral student who downloads music instead of writing his dissertation, bullshits his TA work, and resents his wife for having wealthy parents. He's an insecure slacker, completely annoying, and I loved him. To me, he felt like the only real character; maybe because he was the one
The style was reminiscent of the Bill Fitzhugh novels I've been reading -- where the multiple characters are all connected in ways they didn't know they were. And they effect each other's outcomes without ever even meeting each other. The novel starts of slow, describing the setting and people, then you learn how they all intersect, and finally the face-paced ending where it jumps from story to story. So it was a style I liked, and I can't say he copied it since I'm sure Fitzhugh got it from someone else ...
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