Frank Kohler is ready to snap. He is capable of love, but he knows time is running out. His mother was brutally murdered, and he never knew his father. With each passing day he perceives his anger with an almost religious sense of beauty. In an attempt to save himself, he decides to marry a mail-order bride from Russia.
Russell Boyd is a state trooper who resists those acts that damage life forever. He has seen about as much of them as he can take. And yet, he has met the woman who makes him feel whole. She is the center of his life.
Frank Kohler’s and Russell Boyd’s paths will cross three times. And the third time will change everything. It is the moment when the line between good and evil is made dramatically clear.
As with such modern classics as Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Craig Nova gives us an illuminating story of characters who struggle against the collisions of fate, and who are motivated by the touching need to be human.
Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His latest novel is THE INFORMER, a literary thriller set in 1930s Berlin.
Nova's writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
"Craig Nova is a fine writer, one of our best," writes Jonathan Yardley, book critic for the Washington Post. "If you haven't read him, the loss is yours." "He's a novelist who has yet to write a supermarket bestseller...but he has written at least two American classics that will likely resonate after his death, the way the poor-selling 'Great Gatsby' did for poor ol' F. Scott Fitzgerald," writes David Bowman of Salon.com.
Nova's life has been a plethora of experience, almost like something straight out of Hollywood -- where Nova, coincidence or not, was raised. From rebellious and alienated youth in the Hollywood Hills to graduation from University of California at Berkeley during the turbulent 1960s; from starving artist years in New York City to a placid and content writing life in more rustic parts, Nova's rich experience has made him "an artist in full command," as Yardley says.
Raised during the Golden Age of Hollywood, Nova was unfazed by the star-studded environment of his childhood. "Like all kids, I thought that my immediate surroundings were perfectly natural and that the whole world was just like Hollywood," says Nova. "In fact, I think my entire life has been spent correcting this misperception, or at least realizing that there is a difference between the way things appear and the way they really are.
"I remember playing with Jayne Mansfield's daughter when I was about eight, and racing Steve McQueen on Mulholland when I was 16," recounts Nova. As a teenager, he attended the famed and celebrity saturated Hollywood High. There he, with most of the Mouseketeers as classmates, lived out his share of youthful rebellion.
Nova made up for those minor transgressions by being a diligent student at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated just weeks before the Summer of Love. "When I was there, someone in the state senate stood up and said, 'A course at Berkeley is a course in sex, drugs, and treason.' I have to say he was damn right."
After graduation, Nova moved to New York City and attended Columbia University, where his writing ambitions flourished. There at Columbia, he met Jean Stafford, a profound influence who introduced him to "the writing life." Upon publishing his first book, Turkey Hash in 1975, Nova won the Harper Saxton prize, putting him in the ranks of such esteemed writers as Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin. "I assumed that when it was published, it would change my life," he says, "Of course, not a lot happened. I ended up driving a taxicab in New York."
The years between Nova's first and third novel found him struggling, not only to write, but also to survive. He worked a variety of odd jobs constantly balancing attempts to support himself with his writing endeavors. In addition to driving a cab, his diverse experiences included carpentering in SoHo and managing a small real estate empire. "There were some very hard times here, going hungry, ending up on the street, broke," Nova recollects. "I find it hard to remember the will it took to go on writing under those circumstances."
During Nova's early years in New York City, he met his wife Christina at a party. Describing their first encounter in his memoir Brook Trout and the Writing Life, Nova writes, "Like all chance meetings that turn out differently than one supposes, I almost did not go to this party." To get away from the city, he and Christina would venture up to her small house in the country on weekends with increasing frequency. Christina gave him his first fly rod, with which he caught a brook trout during one of their escapades to the house. The brook trout, then merely a fish, would go on to reappear throughout Nova's life, serving as a powerful link between intimate events and, eventually, giving the title to his memoir. Of his and Christina's decision to wed, he writes, "We planned to get married, and then we did."
Nova's fourth book, The Good Son, received a substantial advance from the publisher and met almost universal critical acclaim. When the young couple decided to leave New York City for a more serene life in the country, Christina quit her job at CBS, where she had been working in television news. "I managed the land as a tree farm, and I have to say this was one of the most happy times in my life," Nova recalls. "I'd write in the morning and then work in the woods in the afternoons. And when I saw something in the woods, bears, deer, rugged grouse, foxes, they found a way into the book I was writing."
After having two daughters, Craig and Christina moved to Vermont, where their kids went to school and he went on to write another five or six novels. "This was a lovely time, too, in that I would write in the morning and afternoon, and then cook for the children and Christina. Idyllic, in a way, but the difficulty of course is the nature of the writing life," Nova says. "You are either on your way up or on your way down and this endlessly changing prospect made for a continual uneasiness."
During this time, Nova worked on magazine assignments to fulfill his dreams of going to places he'd wanted to see and picked up plenty of inspiration along the way: "I went to the equatorial Pacific, went fly fishing in Austria and on the San Juan River, flew with bush pilots...all of which came in handy in the writing of novels." He wrote screenplays for Touchstone Pictures and Behavior, a Canadian company.
"When my children went away to college, I realized that I had some extra time on my hands," says Nova. "I thought it would be a good idea to share some of what I had learned after those years alone in a room." In 2005 he was offered an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and accepted. There, he serves as 1949 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.
Nova writes for Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men's Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim award. He and Christina live in North Carolina.
As for the brook trout, Nova writes, "these fish are forever associated in my mind with the depths of thankfulness for good fortune, just as they always reminded me of beauty and a sense of what may be possible after all." He continues to fish for brook trout.
Cruisers can refer both to the car driven by State Trouper Russell Boyd or the two men who cruise thorough this dark novel, Boyd and a wacked out computer techie named Frank Kohler.
Boyd cruises Vermont's highways during the night, chasing down speeders and lawbreakers. He loves his job, but broods about the dangers, knowing that anything can happen when he stops someone. He lives with school teacher Zofia Wira who worries throughout the night about whether or not he'll come home safe and sound. Only when he does, can she relax and start her day.
Kohler is a lonely, damaged and slightly deranged soul who saw his prostitute mother murdered when he was a child. It's a memory that haunts him. How could it not? Like the Beatle's song, he believes all he needs is love and he searches for it with a Russian mail order bride, who is not exactly what he expected. Katryna Kolymov, the bride, has her own agenda, one very different from Frank's, and in the end it pushes him beyond where any sane man would ever go and being that Frank is a man drawn to black, to the dark, when he's pushed, violence is the result.
The book alternates between Russ and Frank's stories, crossing paths just three times, the first when Russ and Zofia accidentally trespass on Frank's land when they are fishing, from that point on, we sense that something bad, something very bad is going to happen, and it's impossible to stop reading. This is a dark book, beautifully written by a masterful storyteller. The characters stay with you long after you've turned the last page, intruding into your night, hanging around throughout the day.
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This review is from: Cruisers: A Novel (Hardcover)
A highway patrolman, a computer repairman, their girlfriends (one from Russia) and some strange side characters all contemplating their every sensation and thought in great detail. The fog gets pretty thick at times and within it a few people are killed, some are terrified and some love weaves though it, both beautiful and sick. I would not have thought I would like such a book, but at the end, it left me with such strong feelings that I had to say it was pretty good - at least a 3.5. It is not so much a mystery, nor a thriller, as it is just a psychological study through which, if we hang in there, we may learn a few things about ourselves
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This review is from: Cruisers: A Novel (Hardcover)
A murdered woman lying by the side of the road, her breasts mutilated; a pregnant Russian mail order bride; a strangely conceived foxhunt; and a black snake - a metaphor for all that is evil - slithering through the rafters of a country cabin. With an almost symphonic force, author Craig Nova brings these seemingly disparate elements together to create a story that is infused with drama, love and tells an evocative tale of loneliness and the isolation of life. The characters in Cruisers are desperate and fraught, trapped in emotional cages of their own making; they're ready to snap, endlessly driven by anger, desperation, and colossal family conflict.
Told in alternating chapters and set in Southern Vermont, Cruisers is a portrait of two men, each battling with his own conflicted soul. Both become the prey and the predator, and together they are irrevocably set upon a collision course with one another. Russell Boyd is a Vermont state trooper having doubts about the risks his night-shift job entails. Every night as he traverses the highways and tickets speeders, he wonders whether there are other possibly more serious offenders out there. Falling into the arms of Zofia, his lover, Russell seeks solace from the rigors of the job. But Zofia, a responsible schoolteacher, knows the inherent dangers of Russell's job and hesitates to make a binding pledge to him.
When Zofia becomes pregnant and considers an abortion, Russell is left with a sense of a collision between common sense and his beliefs about what he should do. He tries to decide just what it was he needs to hang on to - was it his grandfathers love or the certainty of what things are like when they go wrong? Plagued by the ineffectual, and haunted by Zofia's worries, Russell feels powerless to stop the tawdry senselessness of his job, which seems to exist in the memory of colours and the half-frozen landscape. Life has left Russell restless and fatigued so he permanently hangs between the two.
Frank Kohler, a thirty-year-old computer repairman, lives alone in the Vermont woods and patrols his property with a fanaticism that borders on the dangerous. Frank is struggling with a "deep and nameless turmoil" and is driven by the angry memories of his murdered mother. In desperation, he decides that love will save him, but since he's too publicly clumsy to court a woman, he orders a mail-order bride from Russia. Frank constantly lives on the edge and the only reason he has been able to survive is by being careful about what he had led himself to remember.
Frank's sense of fragility, which he detested and his closeness to that abyss of sparkling light, steadily becomes worse. Racked with life's claustrophobia, Frank's emotional solace though love is futile, because the dye has already been cast. It is though everything about the world that he couldn't get control of had been there when he found his mother murdered. His new-fangled flashy black sports car and his new Russian bride have unfortunately come to late for him.
Nova steadily builds the tension with a subdued but mighty force. Both men are emotionally disconnected, but they ache to reconnect to those they love. Russell, in an effort to solve the mystery of the murdered woman, goes to the hotel where she was last seen. Frank wonders the fields of his property remembering the battered torso of his mother that was found in a box by the local river. At once refrained, but also quite unnerving and powerful, Nova has a formidable noir style that gradually encapsulates the reader, unadulteratingly revealing the steadfast heart of human quandary and insecurity. Mike Leonard March 05.
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