A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Ken Kalfus (Author), James Boles (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2007

HANDLE

A rollicking dark comedy about terrorism, war and conjugal strife.



DESCRIPTION

Joyce and Marshall Harriman are struggling to divorce each other while sharing a cramped, hateful Brooklyn apartment with their two small children. On the morning of September 11, 2001 Joyce departs for Newark Airport to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall goes to his office in the World Trade Center. She misses her flight, and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in a devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other is dead and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy.

Opening with a swift kick to our national piety, A DISORDER PECULIAR TO THE COUNTRY follows Joyce and Marshall as they swallow their mutual disappointment, their divorce conflict intensifies, and they suffer, in unexpectedly personal ways, the many strange ravages that beset America in the first years of the Bush regime. Joyce suspects Marshall has sent an anthrax-laced envelope to her office. Marshall taps her phone and studies plans for constructing a suicide bomb. The stock market crash and the war in Afghanistan, Abu Gharaib and the clash of civilizations: all become marital battlefields.

Concluding with the liberation of Iraq, A DISORDER PECULIAR TO THE COUNTRY astonishingly lampoons how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most intimate private terrors.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kalfus's novel of post-9/11 anomie and family disintegration is barbed with hidden punch lines and embedded pockets of horror-clad humor. The tangled, slow-motion journey toward divorce of a harried, bitter upper-middle-class New York couple unfolds in the midst of a city under siege, during a time of catastrophic political and social upheaval. Respecting the nature of Kalfus's novel, Boles treads carefully and lightly. He rarely interferes in the hurtling motion of Kalfus's prose, studded as it is with asides and stray thoughts, preferring instead to stand back and allow the words room to breathe. Reading in a detached, polite manner, he grants Marshall and Joyce the opportunity to hang themselves with their own words, knowing they will need no assistance whatsoever from his performance.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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."
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker - click here to subscribe. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Your Coach Digital; Unabridged edition (September 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596591218
• ISBN-13: 978-1596591219
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.5 x 5.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,643,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

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

By 

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

By 

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?"