Chasing the Wolf [Hardcover]

Nathan Singer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2006

A tender look into the madness of love, the madness of hate, and the dark secrets that lie along the banks of the muddy Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With its interracial romance and time-traveling plot, Singer's latest (after A Prayer for Dawn) bears a superficial resemblance to Octavia E. Butler's Kindred. But this lighter novel, a blend of romance, historical fiction, action and sci-fi, sends a white man back in time and reflects his youthful, colloquial voice. Told from alternating points of view, the novel opens with the story of Eli Cooper, a 27-year-old painter living in New York City in 2001, who finds himself, immediately after the death of his African-American wife, Jessie, stranded in Mississippi in 1938. He works baling hay with a "crew of Black folks," all the while charting his observations in a journal (and paying homage to various delta blues musicians). But the appearance of Ella, who looks remarkably like Jessie, further complicates matters. She, too, keeps a diary in which she confides an uncomfortable attraction to the new stranger in town. This obstacle-ridden love story takes an unexpected turn with the introduction of Jerome Kinnae, a "time walker" who holds the key to reuniting Eli and Ella in the present. Though the novel never feels very harrowing despite the dangers the couple face, Singer's freewheeling prose style moves the story at a brisk pace. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

In this unconventional novel made up of a pastiche of desperate diary entries, e-mails, and newspaper articles, tattooed and dreadlocked Eli Cooper, a 27-year-old white NYC artist dubbed the child of Edvard Munch and Jackson Pollack, suffers a severe emotional shock upon discovering that his wife, Jesse, a black dancer, has been killed in a tragic accident. The next day he wakes up in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1938; he is wholly disoriented but soon finds a job picking cotton. He suffers another shock upon realizing that the maid in his boardinghouse bears a strong resemblance to his late wife. Their common love for blues music and their easy rapport convince Eli that he has traveled back in time to be reunited with the love of his life, but his radical ideas about the mixing of the races draw the enmity of his new community. Howlin' Wolf and the 1965 Watts riots also figure prominently in this rollicking dash through space and time that will especially appeal to blues lovers. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 172 pages
• Publisher: Bleak House Books (March 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932557148
• ISBN-13: 978-1932557145
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #636,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Go along for a ride..., December 4, 2005

By 

Katie G. "Katie G." (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chasing the Wolf (Hardcover)

Chasing the Wolf reads like a chase, with a writing style, and page layout that forces a reader to keep turning, keep looking, keep chasing, as our main character first stumbles, then chases through time. A love story, an artist's story, a fantasy, an ode to Robert Johnson, and oh yeah, there's time travel too, all crafted together with bits and pieces of everyday sarcastic goodness. The highlight of the storytelling is the dialogue. Writing conversations realistically, to the point where the conversations are believeable is a difficult thing....but Nathan makes me feel like I'm eavesdropping.

I'm not sure if Nathan was on speed, or heavily caffeinated when he wrote this book, but the story moves at a pace that leads me to believe that must have been true. And, as the story jumps from NYC to little towns in Mississippi, from present day, to Depression-era, the reader just goes along for the ride. Nathan writes with the flavor and color and humor of Vonnegut, and the images fall into place without overly excessive detail.

Hot shot, hipster, high-art-society New York City....to rural, small town, dirt roads....and this is just the first ten pages. "Everyone in New York is "neo" something" - well Nathan Singer is a neo-literary-genius.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like Nothing I've Ever Read Before, December 28, 2005

By 

Chalice M. Hacker - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chasing the Wolf (Hardcover)

Chasing the Wolf is like the cyclone from The Wizard of Oz--it picks you up and you stare through your window at whirling faces who transform from the ordinary into nightmares. Only in this case the cyclone sets you down someplace much darker than Oz.

Although the plot involves time travel, it doesn't have a have a science fiction feel to it at all. Like Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return and Jack Finney's Time and Again, the focus is on the characters, not the mechanics of a time machine but this is far more dangerous. Octavia Butler's Kindred is the closest thing I've ever encountered: dealing with race relations and devotion beyond time.

I'm not normally the type who wants to read a happy-ending version of King Lear or hope for Lear II: Regan's Revenge but in this case I would love to see more of these characters and the world of this novel. Just the theories of Time-walking that one Walker develops are better than any hard-pseudo-science explanation. We get a glimpse of something incredibly intriguing and it ends before I was ready to let go. It's like watching a beautiful woman begin to undress but then she sees you and yanks shut the blinds.

I highly recommend Chasing the Wolf but don't start it at night if you have to wake up early in the morning.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No matter where you go, you gonna come back home someday, November 18, 2005

By 

C. Incognito - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chasing the Wolf (Hardcover)

A modern-day Billy Pilgrim (Eli Cooper from twenty-first century New York City) meets 1930's Mississippi blues heroes, friends, and eventually foes while searching for answers in pre-modern times. Similarites between past and present cultural issues surface in surprising ways to make this book an important read for people from all ages and walks of life.