From Publishers Weekly
The inhabitants of an apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York City are the actors in five deft reenactments of classic literary works in this debut collection; the other four stories explore the fringes of comfortable late-20th-century life in and around the city. On West 89th St. in the 1970s and '80s, young Davie Birnbaum ("I was a spooky kid in my cousin's hand-me-down corduroys.... My hair was cut in a puffy bell") takes stock of his neighbors' eccentricities. There is Solly Schlacter, unfortunate young son of a disbarred proctologist, who plummets to his death on Icarus wings from the roof of the building ("Musee des Beaux Arts," indebted to W.H. Auden's poem of the same title). There is Benjamin Button, of the title story, a shady-looking young man who is revealed to have been born as a withered ancient, like the protagonist of Fitzgerald's story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." There is the mysterious Wakefield, who fakes his death and spies on his wife and children across the street ("Wakefield, 7E"). And there is Kevin MacMichaelman, onetime ringleader of Davie's band of friends and, as an adult, the demented docent of an autobiographical museum he has created out of his parents' apartment ("A Penal Colony of His Own, 11E"). Set slightly farther afield, in Cold Spring Harbor, is "Bachelor Party," in which the narrator's devoutly Jewish older brother tells of his bizarre affair with the daughter of an ex-Nazi. Brownstein's distinctively skeptical, faintly elegiac voice and sense of place link all the stories, overriding the anxiety of influence to produce marvelously smooth hybrid tales that prompt readers to think twice about the intersection of life and fiction.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Brownstein's first collection offers a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of the tenants of a West 89th Street apartment building in New York City. Incorporating elements of works by Auden, Kafka, Hawthorne, Singer, and Fitzgerald (the title story, in fact, is a reworking of a Fitzgerald tale of the same name), Brownstein combines humor, absurdity, and elegy to create linked stories that are strong enough to stand on their own. Speaking retrospectively, in some cases even beyond death, his narrators are brilliantly observant. In the voice of Davey Birnbaum, Brownstein demonstrates a talent for capturing innocence comparable to that of Salinger or Capote. Davey's accounts of his mid-1970s childhood and of friends and neighbors falling into madness and obscurity are made vivid by precise details and descriptions. Sympathetic and perceptive, unpretentious yet engaging, these stories are infused with a genuine sense of place; Brownstein's New York is a home for memories, a refuge for eccentrics. Highly recommended. Julia LoFaso, formerly with "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
