Customer Reviews

Half-Life: A Novel

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My expectations were not high for this book, which was heavily promoted in several gay magazines.

As a huge fan of gay literature (and literature, in general), I read the book in 3-4 sittings.

Krach's sense of character is terrific; his story-telling sparse.

I wish he had cut back on some of the characters in order to have more "quality time" with some of the main characters, but he creates a very surreal feel to a fake town outside of Los Angeles. An anti-OC, for sure.

It's good, it's fast -- and it's not going to change your life. Ultimately, I found myself wanting something else to happen. With all of the foreshadowing, one expects something gigantic to happen in Act Three, and, a lot like life, everything just kind of melds together.

One nit-picky thing (that has nothing to do with Aaron Krach or his obvious abilities) -- how does Alyson Publications get away with publishing a book FULL of typos, grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes?

When I read that this novel centered on the relationship between a 38 year old man and an 18 year old man I was a little worried it was going to be nothing more than erotica (not that anything is wrong with that; just not what I wanted to read). Instead, what I found was a wonderfully observed and detailed novel that put me in mind of Anne Tyler. Mr. Krach does a terrific job of making me understand how Adam (18) and Jeff (38) come to fall in love. In fact, by the end of the book I had completely forgotten there was any age difference at all.

As if their romance wasn't enough to propel the story forward the author also includes a truly unique mystery involving Adam and his father. I don't want to give anything away, but I was turning the pages like mad to find out how the situation was resolved. Another thing I appreciated about Half: Life was how the author treated the issue of gay teens. Like other recent books including Rainbow High and Geography Club the teens in this story aren't angst ridden over being gay. Which isn't to say they live in some perfect world, only that the characters themselves are much more comfortable with themselves than teens even ten years ago. Very refreshing. All in all, an excellent first novel and I look forward to reading more of Mr. Krach's work!

Shame on Allyson Publications! I place the blame for this sorry excuse for a novel squarely on their shoulders. While the author may be guilty of poor writing, it is, after all, a First Novel, and what the author needed was a good editor to guide him toward respectable finished product. Obviously, he didn't receive it.

The novel reads like a first-draft manuscript, and to charge money and sell this kind of incompetent writing to the general public is criminal. The book is rift with bad grammar, poor punctuation, sentences that aren't even mildly literate. The author confuses "your" and "you're" consistently, and makes grammatical errors that aren't just a result of style but of completely uneducated ignorance.

But these are all mistakes which would have---should have----been caught by an editor, "polished off", as it were. Instead, the reader is left putting his chin on his folded arms and giving up trying to decipher the author's intent in sheer frustration.

I understand, from the author's biography on the cover, that he is, himself, a magazine editor, so perhaps he felt he didn't need anyone to edit or proofread his novel before publishing. Yet the onus still falls to Allyson for failing to do justice to the work before putting it in print.

Other than the above mentioned errors, there's a lack of substance to the story, and far too many momentary segues to inconsequential musings that bear no direct relation to the story being told. Important scenes are broken by what amounts to sidebars in the lives of minor characters, for no explicit reason. Major issues are never resolved, nothing is learned by any of the weak characters, and the plot is thin and over-written.

This book is a travesty that was published before it was ready to be sold to the general public, and definitely isn't worth the price paid, even if you purchased it on a second-hand table. Shame on all involved.

Half-Life is a pretty astute character study of young, urban school-age gay guys. The novel is packed with great, lively characters that mischievously weave in and out of each other's lives and affect each other in unexpected ways. For a first novel, Half-Life is a major achievement for Aaron Krach - he has a keen understanding of intergenerational gay relationships, providing an extremely perceptive account of modern gay life and the sorts of issues that gay people, particularly younger gay people face today.

Set amongst the highways and byways of Los Angeles, Krach places his characters in the fictional suburb of Angelito - "a stretch of land near downtown L.A. unnoticeable because of its ordinariness." Angelito is a place of strip malls and two and three-bedroom houses "connected by driveways to blackish streets." Adam Westman and his best friend Dart are two local gay boys, who like spending lazy afternoons talking and hanging out at the local 7-Eleven, waiting for school to finish so they can get on with their lives.

The narrative centers on Adam, who is just turning eighteen and is on the verge of manhood. He lives with his disheartened and miserable father, Greg, and his creative younger sister, Sandra. When Greg unexpectedly dies of a drug overdose, the family is fractured and Greg and Sandra are forced to live with their self-obsessed mother Vivian who works in the local movie industry exporting B-grade television shows to Eastern Europe. Along the way, Adam meets Jeff, a 38 year old, masculine, sexy policeman who likes to surf in his spare time. Jeff showers Adam with romance and attention and forces Adam to come to terms, not just with his father's death, but the possibility of having "true love" in his life for the first time.

We follow Adam, Dart, and a rich cast of supporting characters as they live through an unforgettable summer together and find the answer to many of life's challenges. For Adam and Jeff, romance is "forward motion that is guaranteed; but it can take forever to go a mile, and they will probably spend a lot of time standing still. Waiting." I liked the intelligent, sensitive wordplay between Jeff and Adam. Krach takes his time setting up their relationship and lets their romance develop at a leisurely and unhurried pace.

Half-Life combines a coming of age story and a teenage romance with a judicious look at the challenges that young gay people face in life. The challenge for Adam is to overcome his piece of pure sadness - the one he was born with, not the one created by has dad's passing. Sadness joined with melancholy has intersected with self-pity dropping him off at "a fork in the road." With an intelligent use of dialogue and economical, literate style that is also engaging and lyrical, Krach shows us that love can be scary and forbidding, yet also raw, fabulous and sexy. Some readers may find the novel thin on plot and the pacing a little slow, but the wonderfully three-dimensional characters and the fact that Adam, Jeff and Dart are so comfortable within themselves, more than make up for the book's shortcomings. Mike Leonard September 04.

There's nothing exceptionally bad about this book. What's unfortunate is there's nothing exceptionally good about it either. As a first novel, it's hardly terrible, but the story is just so blah. And the cast of characters is more than a bit too broad. It makes the central characters seem fuzzy and out of focus. Mr. Krach is trying to write another entry into the great Gay Coming Of Age Genre, and, while the path is well trod, there is still enough fertile ground to tell interesting stories. And there's an interesting story here as well, about the two gay guys who are taking their first cautious steps into that awkward place between the children they were and the adults they will become.

This book lulls you in with some serene prose, an interesting and somewhat hypnotic tone, and the promise of a good plot. Remarkably, it manages to dangle that carrot in front of your face long enough to lure you all the way to the end, but when you finally get there you feel completely disappointed. A 35 year old cop ends up getting it on with a precocious teenager? Big whoop. Their interaction was so boring and anticlimactic. Furthermore, the two main characters interact so rarely this book, which is retarded for a novel whose premise is basically based on the idea that two men of varying ages can offer something revelation-inspiring to each other. And it becomes a complete let-down when you realize that what the author offers as epiphany is bland and lackluster.. Even more disappointing, author doesn't deliver on any of the smaller subplots that he set up either. There are a handful of significant characters whose plots just sort of go nowhere. Nothing gets tied up or even picks up any significant speed. The characters seem like they're cool, and you want to get to know them better, but in the end they prove ultimately underdeveloped. Essentially, this is a book that wants to present itself as conceptual - a book exploring life through the vehicle of an imaginative geography called Angelito - or at least this is what the book jacket insinuates. Initially, I was intrigued. But in order to pull off a book like this successfully, you have to have stronger underlying story. The work has to delve a little deeper, say a little more about life. This book's a buzz-kill because you get to end and it's said nothing at all....except maybe that Southern California sucks. And what was the point of writing a book about that?! The combination of the lofty concept combined with the lack of significant depth necessary to achieve that aim equates to a "wanna-be", pretentious work. And finally, about the wide-shot, artsy fartsy scenes on the last couple pages...they only managed to cement my opinion that this book wants to be more than it is. Simply put - It's a case of good writing but bad story-telling.

I don't know much about Southern California, but the world of HALF LIFE jumps up at the reader fully installed. There are the two high school friends, Adam and Dart, both of them cute and Dart newly so, so he's not used to being cruised or indeed any kind of attention at all. There's the gay cop Jeff, in his mid-thirties, who takes a shine to Adam a week before Adam's graduation day. Adam's dad is a piece of work who needs more watching than any baby, and his mother has abdicated her place in the family in search of a hot career.

The book is too long and some of the gay boys' banter is truly uninspired. Dart complains of getting a B in English: "I hate Jane Austen. She can take her pride abd her prejudice and keep em." But Krach has the power to keep you reading along despite every lapse in taste or sense. He has the old standby of the novel, narrative drive, and he plays this card in unexpected places. The unlikely love affair between Jeff and Adam plays itself out in a truly sexy way, so you're rooting for them both to score, and Krach plays with your expectations in this regard like a master puppeteer. Only his puppets breathe and quarrel and drive fast just like real boys do.

I don't believe in June 1999 when the novel is set that any one, except maybe a casting agent, would admire another character's looks by saying he's "built like Vin Diesel." Vin Diesel wasn't known to the moviegoing public in general for another couple of years. PITCH BLACK and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS were only lustful anticipations in the Hollywood dream factory. But that's just a movie queen talking, and it's the only mistake in chronology I could see in Aaron Krach's complicated, rewarding novel of manners.

Some may consider "Half-Life" a reason for redefining their own beliefs about contemporary life and love, in any shapes, forms, and circumstances it may come.
"Half-Life" deals with real, serious, contemporary issues of our everyday life. Characters are three-dimensional, evolving throughout the story. It is easy for readers to identify with the characters, after all, who hasn't been a teenager, or in love? Who hasn't had questions and unsecurities about a new beginning?
The author's storytelling talent comes through from the first page to the last. That is yet, another reason the read is engaging, excellent!

What a wonderful book! I couldn't put it down! Krach's style is outstandingly lucid. The denouement was well worth the wait involving reading the chapters that preceded it! I've read over 300 books of gay fiction during the last 30+ years, and this is now in my list of 10 favorites!

Half-Life is a well-written, concise look at both gay teen and adult life. It's the story of 18-year-old Adam, on the verge of graduation, his best friend, Dart, and how transitions in life can occur suddenly and dramatically--though all can turn out for the best more easily than you might think.

Part of the plot is Adam meeting Jeff, a 38-year-old police officer, and their tentative, even burgeoning, romance. While they carefully explore the possibility of getting together, despite high obstacles, Adam's friend Dart looks for love of his own.

The teenage dialogue is right on the mark and the love scenes sizzle. This isn't a light-fluff gay romance novel, but a meaningful, thoughtful story of lives that intersect.