Customer Reviews

Elysiana

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4 star:		(1)
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I screwed up and made my review a reply, so here is my review. The book is great but having spent many summers in the 60's "down the shore" [In Jersey you don't go to the beach you go "down the Shore"] The Book really doesn't reflect the realities of the Jersey Shore in the Sixties or early Seventies. I don't think there is more than a cursory mention of Vietnam, which was always in our background. Guys would be drafted and disappear for a year or two in the Army, or join up to be "safer" in the Navy or Coast Guard. Many guys would be in the guard like GWBush, but since long hair was in they'd wear short hair wigs for the "Guard" weekends. Dope and Booze were not yet as integrated as the movies would show and heads and hippies usually disdained beer, especially if they had to pay for it, but still the bars were crazy . Anyone who did a matinee at Jerry Lynch's in Belmar would never forget it. The Take a Whack trio doing bad covers. dollar beers. [they were only a quarter at DJ's down the street] Everyone chipping in till the whole bar was covered with full mugs and everyone drank, sang along, a few puked, some fights, and every once in a while a guy even got lucky if he stayed sober enough. The Jersey Girls were Jersey Girls. By the end of the Matinee the concrete floor was covered with liquid of mixed indeterminate origin, HOw we didn't drown afterward is beyond me [we'd swim in the ocean to sober up before eating supper and going out again] I wish the author knew this. Someone write that book but the plot for this if not reflecting the reality is great as is the characters. I recommend it just don't thing that it is the way it was.

The blurb on the back cover of this bound galley intrigued me: "...both a hurtling thriller and postmodernist jaunt through the summer of 1969..." After making a valiant effort (I put it down and came back to it three times), I'm here to tell you this novel may be postmodern, whatever that may mean, but it is definitely not hurtling, and not a thriller.

Let me tell you the good things. The novel opens with great promise and one of the best introductions to a character I've ever read: Gwendalynn's arrival in the coastal community of Elysiana, a semi-conscious passenger in the back of a convertible, flashing the truckers as she comes down from a three-day high. I liked her right off the bat. Sadly, she is one of only three characters I actually gave a damn about. The other two were Sweetie, a charming and independent 10-year-old with a penchant for wandering; and Jack, a coma survivor who lives in the rundown grand hotel once run by his family. Everyone else inhabiting this fictional island either annoyed the fire out of me, or engendered great dislike, or both. I can read a story when a couple/three characters are actively unpleasant, but a novel peopled almost entirely with folks I can't stand? Not happening.

It's too bad, too, because Chris Knopf can turn a phrase. He has a good ear for dialogue, like the following exchange:

"I have everything I need in my backpack."
"Do you have cruelty in there?"
"I have a horsehair shaving brush in the pack. It was cruel to take it from the horse."

Knopf's flair for description can make you hear the squabbling seagulls and feel the ocean breeze. Ultimately, though, he failed to keep my interest. At the end of chapter 9, at 118 pages, I still didn't know what this story was about and didn't care enough about the characters to keep reading and find out.

Regardless of my apathetic reaction to the novel itself, I appreciate The Permanent Press and LibraryThing's Early Reviewers giving me the opportunity to try a new author.

And the cover art is gorgeous.

This is an excellent book. It's an evocation of one summer in 1969. It's so well written you're there in the sand and sun, sleazy bars, back alleys and a raging storm.
It's a thriller/mystery, by genre. But much more. The prose is clean and lively, extremely descriptive both physically and psychologically. The characters are alive (cliche, I know, but true).
The story is about love, memory loss, drugs, competing politicians and odd, wonderful outsiders. It's about the Atlantic ocean and a sandy strip of an island off the New Jersey shore - maybe a microcosm of the world, maybe just a slice of one summer long ago.
For folks who like good writing, complex characters, interlocking relationships and, perhaps, a hint of fantasy with their mystery, buy this one. It's very good.

I've admired Chris Knopf's Sam Aquillo mysteries, partly for their plot, but mostly for Knopf's slightly off-kilter characters and voice. Elysiana is more a mainstream/literary foray into the last summer of the sixties, but his characters are still loopy and his ear for nuance impeccable.

Knopf has always created strong and interesting female characters, and here he gives us Gwendalynn, a space cadet with a taste of irony and her equally delightful companions, Paula and Sylvia. Paula and her husband Norm hire Gwendalynn to baby-sit Sweetie, their seven-year-old daughter who has more brains than both her parents combined, while Norm engages in a turf war to become a big fish in the tiny pond of Elysiana, a 25-mile-long island off the New Jersey coast. Sylvia Buente is married to Eduardo (Don't call him Eddie), the biggest drug dealer on the island.

Knopf's men are no less tilted. John Halcyon now lives on the top floor of an otherwise vacant 20-story hotel he inherited from his mother, and it suits him well. He was in a coma for four years after an automobile accident and has lost none of his reasoning but most of his social skills. When Gwendalynn shows up at the tail end of a three day long acid trip and needs a place to stay, Halcyon has plenty of room to offer her. Petey Amato, Halcyon's buddy from years ago, has run afould of both Eddie Buente and the local police, and needs advice. And Mike Ditzler, the Harvard educated lifeguard, shares living space with Sylvia, terrified that Eddie will find out.

The book isn't so much about plot as it is about exploring these people's characters and gradually entangling alliances in the political microcosm of an island on the edge of social change at the end of the sixties. Knopf can make even a grim situation both insightful and funny, and you end up caring for all these people, even though you wouldn't want some of them in your living room.
Everything leads up to the major lifequard party/blowout at summer's end as an epic nor'easter bears down on the island, and it washes everything clean for the next round. The feel of the book is vaguely like Tim O'Brien's July July, but works a little better.

If you're looking for another gritty mystery like Knopf's earlier books, this isn't a book for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for intriguing characters and tight funny dialogue with Knopf's trademark understated irony, you'll love this book as much as his early ones.

The sea has a rhythm and music all its own, and can sound like an orchestra as a storm blows up, the quiet piping of ripples slowly overwhelmed by massive drum-rolls and ominous strings that ride in on the wind.

Elysiana by Chris Knopf reads with that same music and rhythm. The instruments are strangers and friends collected on this tiny island off the coast of South Jersey, and the first sweet notes are sounded by a girl from Chicago, brought in through a drug-filled haze in a stranger's car, seemingly unaware of how she got there or what she left behind.

The author conducts his scene-changes skillfully, bringing each new character to life and including details and hints that make it easy for the reader to recognize who's who. There are cops and lifeguards at odds with the curious rules of jurisdiction. A suicidal stranger drives down the street. Fast cars meet rolling trucks. Drug-lord, thief and erstwhile politician devise their plans. Father brings a boat. And behind it all the surf keeps its steady beat below an old hotel whose eagle-eyed, brain-damaged lookout tries to find his missing self--rather like the girl of that first scene.

Fate, justice and friendship play their parts, and everything comes to a head when a violent storm rushes onto the coast. Lives are saved, and souls and selves defined, in the ensuing chaos, till the waves retreat and one still voice pipes its beautifully timed conclusion, drawing everything together with a word.

I think I'm supposed to disclose at some point that the publishers, Permanent Press, generously sent me Elysiana to review. I might disclose too that I love Chris Knopf's earlier Sam Aquillo, Hampton's Mysteries. This novel would serve as a great introduction to the author for anyone not familiar with Sam Aquillo. And I'm sure it will only delight any readers, like me, who already love his writing.

Set on a mythical barrier island off New Jersey in 1969, Elysiana suggests an idyllic summer retreat. The welcome mat belies the genuine point of view of a socially maladjusted town whose disillusioned inhabitants begin their annual war with tourists, surfers, hippies who missed the ride to Woodstock, and specifically each other.

Unconventional conglomeration of town council president, mayor, beach patrol, and drug dealer volley for exalted status with cavalier contempt thrust upon calculating usurpers. If such a diverse assortment fails to adequately provide the appropriate entertainment, the inclusion of a drugged-out Midwestern semi-amnesiac young woman who washes up on shore, a constantly disappearing parentally challenged young girl, a brain-damaged, but brilliant lifeguard offer sufficient distraction to muddle the endless sub-plots in this comic tragedy.

Chris Knopf's impeccable choice of words, flawless writing, and amazing ability to tie this amorphous bundle of bumbling characters through the eye of a wildly unseasonal hurricane, and offer a gratifying cohesive conclusion provides an exhilarating reading experience.

Chris Knopf's new novel is a story of the dissolution of the 1960s culture. Elysiana is a barrier island on the east coast that, like the Elysian Fields, is a final resting place of insightful characters who are heroic and virtuous. It is also an island of unaware characters who are confused and doubtful. And, of course, the long narrow spit of land is a dangerous hunting ground for the antisocial outliers who are cowardly and evil. The year 1969 is a time of fateful action for each group.

A theme of the novel is the theory of entropy as it applies to the physical and social settings of Elysiana. Entropy is reduced as the restrictions placed on these two environments increase producing higher potential energy and more available information. When limits are suddenly exceeded due to changing weather patterns and personal relationships, pent up energy releases and fateful action occurs. As entropy increases, the island landscape is affected, and the interactions of the characters are determined by the Karma of the three groups. Some choose to maximize the probability of living, some are indifferent to fate, and some players choose to stack the deck against themselves. A common thread is the potential of each person, regardless of condition, for love.

This is a novel with a deceptively simple plot that draws the reader into the role of predictor of outcomes. The low level of entropy in the early chapters allows the reader to make accurate predictions of activities that will occur in later chapters as entropy increases. What impressed me about the novel was the power of this metaphor to draw out unbidden memories of my own life as a young adult in the late 60s and reexamine the decisions I made at the height of my own access to information and options.

I highly recommend Elysiana to readers who might enjoy a good story and cathartic experience no matter when they came of age. Mr. Knopf's writing style is relaxed and has an almost perfect pitch related to the coastal environment and the quirky dialogue of residents/transients. I think of Mr. Knopf as a disciplined Thomas Pynchon.

His books are never as good as when he sets them in the east end of long island (hamptons), and Sam Aquillo is the main character. Hopefully he will get back to that. Short Squeze was good but not as good as when Sam is the main protaganist.