A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ken Kalfus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 3, 2006

Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11—and must swallow their disappointment when the other arrives home. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time. In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation’s public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It's a familiar New York story: Joyce and Marshall Harriman's divorce battle escalates from a skirmish to a full-fledged territorial conflict, as both sue for custody of their coveted Brooklyn Heights co-op, and consequently they must both continue to inhabit it—along with their two small children, "their divorce's civilian casualties." Minor acts of domestic terrorism have become an unavoidable part of their daily lives, so when September 11 happens, neither is immediately very jarred. In fact, each thinks the other dead, and celebrates. Far from putting things into perspective, the tragedy and aftermath become a queasily hilarious counterpoint to the ongoing war to divide Joyce and Marshall's assets. Their pettiness reaches continuously lower depths – spying, psychological warfare and even anthrax comes into play. Joyce seduces Marshall's best friend, and Marshall sabotages Joyce's sister's wedding. The Harrimans enact the country's problems on their pathetically personal scale, but the novel miraculously manages to avoid patness or bombast. As in Jay McInerney's recent The Good Life, Kalfus puts 9/11 up against the steel-plated narcissism of New Yorkers—with very different, and very funny, results. (July)
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From The New Yorker

Like their country, Marshall and Joyce Harriman, a Brooklyn Heights couple, are at war. They are one year into an impossibly bitter divorce, and their hatred for one another has "acquired the intensity of something historic, tribal, and ethnic." When Joyce watches the destruction of the World Trade Center she is seized by a "great gladness," because Marshall works on the eighty-sixth floor of the south tower. But he escapes to fight another day in the apartment that neither will relinquish, home to their two young children—"their divorce's civilian casualties." Kalfus skewers the pieties surrounding 9/11, but, having set his black comedy in the shadow of that national trauma, he reverently charts the powerful sway that world events briefly held over the lives of individual Americans. As an Afghan émigré doctor who treats a rash Marshall develops after his escape observes, "Now you know what it's like to live in history."
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Edition edition (July 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060501405
• ISBN-13: 978-0060501402
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,439,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Running Good and then the Wheels Fall Off, February 27, 2007

By 

Taggart Murphy (Jakarta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel (Hardcover)

I agree with the reviews that label this as 'uneven'. I found both the 9/11 materials and the divorce storyline compelling and the characters interesting; Marshall's breakdown was good stuff. The ending has three baffling elements to it [BRUTAL SPOILERS!], the a) shifting point of view to the daughter (whose tone is not distinct enought to render it believable), b) episode at the party which, COME ON!, does this odd set-piece really fit with the rest of this novel?, and c) the alternate reality ending which effective vaporized much of the rest of the resonance of the book. I stayed up late reading the end of this and was ready to toss it off my deck at the end. As I say, the wheels come off.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courageous and brilliant, October 15, 2006

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City Girl (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel (Hardcover)

Everything about this book was unexpected and revealing. Kalfus shatters our ideas about heroism in the wake of tragedy and shows in hilarious detail how we can't help but be who we are: a nation of self-obsessed individuals who only contend with the world around when our own inner turmoil doesn't get in the way. You have to read this book.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It Could Have Been Great, November 12, 2006

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UES - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel (Hardcover)

Joyce and Marshall Harriman might be the only two New Yorkers who have a reason to celebrate on September 11, 2001. Joyce was supposed to be traveling in one of the hijacked planes and Marshall worked in the South Tower. Each expects the other to be dead, but out of sheer luck, both of them survive--much to the disappointment of the other, since the couple is going through a bitter divorce. Forced to stay together in the post 9-11 New York, the Harrimans live a nightmare that Kalfus deftly and bravely turns into the blackest of comedies.

The author, in my opinion, makes two mistakes that nearly ruin what otherwise would be an outstanding novel: he makes Joyce a willing participant in Marshall's attempt to stage a suicide bombing in their apartment. That Marshall would be pushed to such an action is believable; that Joyce would try to help him kill himself, her, and their two children is not.

But the biggest mistake is the ending. While most of the novel takes place in a New York that we remember well, Kalfus makes the very bizarre decision to set the ending in a historical background that is entirely fake. It's a shame, because until then I believed the characters (except for the scene mentioned above) and thought they were well set in New York and in that specific and troubled historical time. But when I got to the end, with its bizarre events in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, I just thought, "huh?"