Customer Reviews

Alternative Atlanta

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Like his excellent collection of short stories, Alternative Atlanta reveals Boswell to be observant, insightful, and wise to the imperfect ways we love and learn and lose and, again and again and again, try to achieve some sensible direction in a frequently inscrutable world. There are so many ways in which this novel--a debut effort!--achieves greatness: the hit-the-nail-on-the-head portrayal of contemporary music (and music criticism); the brilliant evocation of chaotic, Olympic-obsessed Atlanta; the keenly rendered angst and ennui of the protagonist, Gerald, lost in that early thirty-something morass of directionless desire for something (Something stable? Something "deeper"? Something intellectual? Something just around the next corner?); and, of course, the love-of-language brilliance with which Boswell constructs sentences that give nothing short of delight.

Thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman seems about as ready for life as Atlanta was for the Olympics: a certain amount of hope and promise early on that masked their lack of preparedness for coping with realities. Set in the Olympic summer of 1996 in Atlanta, Brinkman for the last three years, after dropping out of grad school as a lit major, has been drifting on pot smoking and writing about local rock bands for the local alternative newspaper, based on the actual Creative Loafing. But even this tentative and minimal existence is now being assailed as his long-standoffish father has arrived on the steps of his apartment with apparently all of his worldly possessions in a few bags and his ex-girlfriend and fellow grad student Nora is suddenly getting married.

The book follows Gerald as he lurches from one unsettled aspect of his life to another. His aloof, quirky, and intellectual father has arrived seemingly intent on unburdening himself with deeply held secrets, but Gerald can't get past his father's withdrawal from real parenting after his mother's death many years ago. Gerald's knowledge of rock music is encyclopedic and has even placed him in demand for a job in New York, yet his lack of enthusiasm is quite noticeable. Any conclusiveness that Nora's marriage could have represented is quickly dispelled as she seeks out Gerald for troubles that begin almost immediately in her marriage. And then there is mutual friend Sasha, a married beauty, who has taken a very keen interest in Gerald.

This book is the anti- perfect childhood, straight through grad school by age twenty-four, and on to a great job book. Not to minimize the difficulties of figuring out what life is all about before one is thirty, these characters, especially Gerald, given their intellectual capabilities, seem overly obtuse, self-destructive, and unable to effectively communicate - Gerald can write but not speak effectively. Most interactions seem to end up in squabbling, followed by a disappearing act. The characters are sympathetic, which keeps the book interesting, but puzzling enough to not be totally believable. At times the misconnections threaten the flow of the book.

Residents and visitors to Atlanta will undoubtedly be taken by the accurate descriptions of the Atlanta landscape: the Philly cheese steak shack on Monroe, Piedmont Park, and Centennial Park - the site of the infamous bombing. The author unnecessarily integrates the practically hysterical search for suspects in the bombing into his story. Given the turmoil and uncertainty in the city and in the lives of the characters, the book ends on a rather pacific, almost predictable, note. A lot of issues disappeared or got better quickly.

Note: One suspects that selected readers were sent early copies of the book. All the reviews just after publication were five stars. Hopefully, early reviewers can resist the pressure to inflate reviews. A nice book, but five stars is a reach.

Boswell has written one of the funniest, most touching novels I've read in a long time. His portrait of s father who moves in with his slacker son is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Check out his first book too while you're at it, a collection of stories called TROUBLE WITH GIRLS.

As a woman, what I really liked most about this book was the character of Nora, who is a remarkably real and complex character. She is emotionally anxious and yet empowered, both vulnerable and strong in her femininity: a balance hard for most writers to achieve, particularly when that writer is male. Yet Boswell manages--within a story of the slow but constant ache of a grown-up boy's very "pre" midlife crisis--to create a woman who deserves our identification and our respect. Nora's counterpart, that grown-up boy, Gerald, is equally compelling in his worried want to be a good son and yet to find his own way. Boswell's portrayal of that "what-am-I-doing-with-my-life" torture we all face somewhere near our 30th year is dead on. Sometimes painfully so. But the angst is relative, and Boswell's prose throughout the book, especially his description of the vast and dazzling chaos that was Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, makes us see the beauty in desolation.

Gerald, a pot-smoking former grad student, now a music reviewer for an alternative newspaper, gets tangled up with a dying father and an old girlfriend who just got married but still hasn't gotten over him. I really liked Marshall Boswell's Trouble With Girls, but didn't find it quite as impressive as other story collections about young men searching for love -- like Steve Almond's My Life in Heavy Metal or Thomas Beller's The Sleep-Over Artist. But with this novel, Marshall Boswell really hits it out of the park. It's a great story with compelling characters -- Nora, the old-flame; the father who make a suprise visit to Gerald in the midst of the Atlanta Olympic games. The father has two big pieces of information it takes him a while to tell. (I won't say won't they are -- discovering them is part of the fun suspense of the book.) Meanwile, the old girlfiend has a couple big secrets of her own. Watching Gerald sort this all out is moving and very funny. The writing is fabulous and the turns of phrases and observations are often brilliantly insightful. I recommend this book to anyone, and I was glad to see in the acknowledgements section that Boswell thanked two writers who I really admire: the aforementioned Steve Almond, and also Robert Cohen, whose two most recent novels -- Inspired Sleep and The Here and Now -- I would recommend to anyone who enjoyed Alternative Atlanta.

Alternative Atlanta is a superbly written novel about strained relationships--strained relationships with one's parents, friends, employers, lovers, ex-lovers, and the city (in this case, Atlanta during the '96 Olympics). It opens with thirty-year old Gerald Brinkman, a graduate school drop-out and local music critic, attending his ex-girlfriend's wedding. Yes, he still has feelings for her, and this wedding is just the first of many difficult trials he finds himself enduring over the next two weeks, including a surprise visit from his widowed father, a job interview in New York, and the news that his newly-married ex-love is several weeks pregnant. The plot's so gripping that, by the last 100 pages, I found myself fighting a compulsion to leaf through the book's final chapters so I wouldn't have to wait to find out what happens next: What is this deep, dark secret his dad's hiding? Who's really the father of the ex-girlfriend's baby? How will the bombing in Centennial Park inevitably factor in? But what kept me from skipping ahead is the quality of the prose. As a former Atlantan myself, I loved all the references to actual street names and local venues that only residents would be familiar with. More importantly, author Marshall Boswell's descriptions of human behavior and relationships are so perceptive and uniquely clever, I didn't want to miss a single word. You won't either.

This is a hilarious, beautiful book. Not a page goes by where there isn't some small, perfect detail that captures a bright facet of life. Reading this novel is like coming out of a movie theater in mid-afternoon - it wakes you up to all that you've been missing: the way a nearly empty coffee cup looks late in the morning, the way the ghosts of your parents haunt you, the way you can't grow up and always have to.

One chapter in particular - where the main character goes for an interview at a rock magazine - is alone worth the price of the book. There's just so much completely smart stuff in here - about the marketing insanity of the Olympics, about the look of 20-somethings in the mid-90s, about the meaninglessness of the names of rock bands. An addictively good read.

I just read an article about the latest trend in hapless young hero lit, and apparently the trend is to write about an unabashed cad,[...] and--oh! Make sure it's not fiction, make sure you're just glorifying your own heinous existence, you handsome memoir-writing rouge, you.
Ugh. Thankfully rather than clutching an air sickness bag, I stumbled upon ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA, a terrific novel about a hapless guy finding thirty to be his "awkward age" with nothing but bad timing and good music to keep him company. "You had your chance, Gerald Brinkman, and you missed it!" he's told early in life and that continues to be his theme: missing work, missing cues, missing his ex, terrified of adulthood despite the fact his friends are dropping out of slackerdom and into Crate and Barrel faster than you can say "I Do." I liked so many things about this novel: sharp, original writing, hilarious scenes, memorable characters--not to mention that it's the first recent novel about THIS city, Atlanta, that I think gets it just right. Yet I guess the thing I like most about it is that Gerald Brinkman seems so darn familiar. The author, Marshall Boswell, writes like some of the guys I've known over the years might write if they could put their particular brand of angst down on paper. ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA is no macho brag-a-thon, just a particular, peculiarly sweet and smartly-written story of a guy and his Dad and his friends, and a summer where he finally learns to pay attention. Boswell doesn't make you want to lead the life in his book, but he sure as hell makes you wish you'd written it.

Great literature affords a safe harbor to explore those deep issues that all inevitably face. The protagonist of fiction will shed light on areas that may be difficult for the reader to see, or even to face without prompting or encouragement. In this case, Alternative Atlanta's Gerald Brinkman represents post-modern man's search for meaning in a world offering many alternatives. His character brings to mind a similar sojourner from 40 years past, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling. While Binx found refuge in the darkened movie theaters of New Orleans, Gerald's escape is found through the alternative music of the 90's. In both cases, these men were forced out of their caves to look for meaning outside of themselves. In Gerald's case, he finally reunited with Nora, and in Binx's, he found direction through Kate. Alternative Atlanta is engaging, quick, and hip, yet its ultimate success is found in its ability to force the reader to pause and examine all the alternatives to meaning that one faces.

Yes I enjoyed this book. Yes it was funny. Yes it was different. It also happened to be wordy, boring if you're not familiar with the Atlanta area, and so predictible. It is in no way great or 5 star material. It's a got-it-from-a-friend, out- of-other-books read.