The Lost Legends of New Jersey [Hardcover]

Frederick Reiken (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2000

Romeo and Juliet in northern New Jersey? Yiddish constellations in Asbury Park? A garbage dump in the Meadowlands that's filled with old musical instruments from a high school marching band? Love and sex, hockey and snorkeling, a family that is falling apart despite the best intentions-this is what Frederick Reiken has delivered in his brilliant second novel.But the real subject is true love, the one and only-known in Yiddish as b'shert. Anthony Rubin, the young protagonist, isn't sure whether he's found it with his neighbor, Juliette, daughter of a reputed Mafioso. His mother, who quits the family after her husband's affair with a neighbor, doesn't believe in true love at all. But his father does, and so does Anthony's grandpa, who meets the love of his life at 78. Reiken is known for creating characters you feel you've known all your life, for mapping landscapes with profound intimacy and wonder. The Lost Legends of New Jersey is a rich, resonant book, filled with joy as well as heartbreak, and the extraordinary magic that can arise within ordinary lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Frederick Reiken's first novel, The Odd Sea, a family grappled with an almost unreal dilemma: the unsolved disappearance of a son. His second effort, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, is also a family saga. But this time the focus--the suburban dissolution of the Rubin clan--is more mundane, and the novel's casual eye toward chronology keeps the plot from accumulating much in the way of momentum. Indeed, the only way young Anthony Rubin can make sense of his experience is to give it a legendary spin:

He was always doing that, making things up, trying to see how it all might fit into a legend. He didn't understand why he did this, because New Jersey was not a legend. It was the armpit of America, according to most people. Still he saw everything around him as a legend.

Anthony, of course, has plenty to contend with. His father, Michael, is a none-too-subtle (if goodhearted) adulterer. His mother, Jess, is prone to breakdowns and would rather be underwater at any given moment than with her children. His best friend, Jay, drifts away when Michael's smoldering affair with Jay's mother begins to disrupt the Rubin marriage. And the alluring girl next door, the brash daughter of a high-stakes gambler, seems always just out of reach. Reiken's style remains unblinking and direct throughout, suggesting that there are no good guys or bad guys in Livingston, New Jersey--just complex, tangible people who remind us what it is to be human. And while Anthony's losses may feel devastating, or even legendary, he knows that they are ultimately survivable. "It's always strange to me that all this is so comforting," he says. "And yet it is." --Brangien Davis

From Publishers Weekly

Elegiac and unsparingly direct, funny and poignant, this second novel by the author of the well-received The Odd Sea is a beautiful story about loss, hope and survival. Between the summer of 1979, when Anthony Rubin is 13, and the winter of 1983, when he is a hockey star in high school, he experiences the breakup of his parents' marriage, loses a close friend, falls in love several times and moves through adolescence with a mixture of yearning and rue. On the one hand, Anthony has grown up fast: his emotionally volatile mother, Jess, has a nervous breakdown because of his father's adultery and leaves the family home in Livingston, N.J., for Florida. Anthony has a sense that good things in his life are already a part of the past. He always sees the present moment at a distance, so he can capture and preserve it in memory. On the other hand, he is slow to mature; afraid of being rebuffed, he is shy with girls. Two astute and kind teenagers intuit his need for mothering. An "older woman"DAlex Brody, the senior manager of the hockey teamDseduces him so he can lose his virginity, and his next door neighbor, Juliette diMiglio becomes his friend and sex partner. While all the characters are drawn with warmth, Juliette will haunt the reader. Her mother commits suicide; her crude, abusive father is regularly beat up by loan sharks; Juliette herself submits to her boyfriend's sadistic behavior and earns a reputation as a slut. Juliette is trapped in the circumstances of her life; Anthony will rise above them. But it is his grandfather, who at 81 meets his b'shert (a Yiddish word that means your fated spiritual other half), who teaches Anthony that he must wait for love. There are some wonderful, almost dreamlike set pieces in this novel, as when Anthony and friends discover a graveyard for musical instruments in the Meadowlands. If Reiken has a fault, it is endowing his characters with feelings that they immediately interpret into emotional insights. At times the psychologizing seems manipulated; too often characters get a mystical feeling that "something had shifted" inside, lifting them to a new stage of understanding. But these are small cavils in a narrative in which separation and loss are palpable, yet faith in survival is conveyed with a sweet but unsentimental clarity. Reiken's message is in a passage from the kabbala: even in the deepest sadness, one can find "sublime joy."
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (August 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005079
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005079
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,917,026 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, heart-wrenching, beautiful, August 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lost Legends of New Jersey (Hardcover)

With his knockout second novel, Reiken makes it clear that he is not a one-hit wonder. A much more complex and multidimensional book than its predecesssor, The Lost Legends once again demonstrates Reiken's uncanny ability to create characters we feel and know and remember. The most amazing thing about the novel, however, is that it simultaneously manages to depict suburban New Jersey as both mundane and magical. The author's gift is that he is capable of taking the ordinary and, while keeping it realistic, achieve a certain resonance that stems directly from the characters' varying and all-too-human points of view. In other words, the magic is not literally magic. Rather, we feel a sense of magic because at certain times we feel a character's sense of wonder and beauty rising out of the sterility of the landscape -- something like the plastic bag scene in "American Beauty." Reiken is masterful at this kind of thing and New Jersey is the perfect setting for such moments of quiet luminosity. In one scene, for instance, the main character and his sister take a nighttime bike ride across Livingston NJ under a full moon. What could easily be banal turns haunting under the glow of the moonlight -- no magic realism here, just emotionally charged childhood wonder (and sorrow). Likewise, the scene in which Anthony finds a garbage dump filled with old band instruments in the Meadowlands becomes legendary... This is a powerful, heart-wrenching book, a must read, whether or not you've ever driven the NJ Turnpike!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Jersey: Through Poetry and Unforgettable Affection., August 25, 2000

By 

TODD STUCHINER (BRIGHTON, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Legends of New Jersey (Hardcover)

A phenomenal achievement. Reiken's second novel, succeeds in capturing the melancholy, and at times almost dreamlike state, of surburn life in New Jersey, circa 1980.Yet the most remarkable accomplishment in the book are its characters. Each of them, carry with them a sweetness burried in thier own confussion about themselves, which makes them wonderfully real. Through choice,the book shies away form the conventional lineal narrative used in his debut The Odd Sea. And as result those who have read his first novel might fight the transition difficult as this book uses multiple view points to show the aftermath and ripple effects of a single event. Moreover, it works brilliantly. It is a remarkable achievement and Reiken's use of emotion through subtly ties the work together between the feelings of love: lost and won.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Work, October 9, 2000

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Lost Legends of New Jersey (Hardcover)

Frederick Reiken has given us a wonderful, brilliant novel. It snuck up on me. I started reading it thinking it was a nice, coming of age in New Jersey novel, but after about 50 pages, I realized it is so much more than that. As a coming of age novel, it is wonderful. Reikien's prose is so evocative of a particular place and time (northern New Jersey, 1979-1981). But this novel is about so much more. It is about the tremendous hold the past has over us, how it keeps being repeated, in our actions and in our minds. It is about stories--the stories we tell, the stories we omit and what the listener/reader must extrapolate from beyond the boundaries of what is told. I highly recommend this book. I don't think you have to be from New Jersey, or in your thirties to appreciate what happens to Anthony Rubin, the wonderful protagonist, and his family. His parents separate after his father's affair with his best friend's mother and Anthony falls in love with the girl next door, whose father just could be in the mafia. A wonderful story, wonderfully told. I highly recommend it.