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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
