Only the Lonely [Paperback]

Gary Zebrun (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

 

Asim, gay and 19, is ready to bust out of his rundown steel town, Lackawanna, N.Y., for the University of Michigan. Even the cherished family business — a movie house called The Bethlehem — and its nightly dose of celluloid dreams no longer captivate him. But the bright future he envisions is turned upside down when his father dies and leaves him with the keys to the theater and the job of caring for the old man’s Russian lover.  As if he needs another problem, he discovers that his brother Tarik is headed off to some kind of training camp in the Afghanistan desert, and when he returns, he ensnarls Asim and others in a dangerous fanaticism that peaks on September 11, 2001.

Gary Zebrun’s first novel, Someone You Know, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. The recipient of Yaddo, MacDowell and Bread Loaf fellowships, he is the Sunday news editor at The Providence Journal, in Rhode Island. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Sewanee Review, The Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, and elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Asim Zahid, the unassuming 19-year-old protagonist of Zebrun's refreshing 9/11 novel (after Someone You Know), is gay, runs a theater in Lackawanna, N.Y., and has a brother who has disappeared to Afghanistan to prepare for jihad. The book begins the week before 9/11 with Asim receiving an ominous delivery: a package from his brother, Tarik, containing the skull of a Jewish boy. As Tarik's motivations become clear, Asim finds something like comfort in a friendship with his dead father's ex-lover, Sonia. Both Asim and Sonia are steeped in isolation and depend on films to find context for their lives, comparing people to actors and real-life events to famous film scenes. Lackawanna, meanwhile, gets some big city problems—a priest is stabbed, a small business owner is murdered and a homemade bomb makes an appearance. Though some developments are a bit outlandish, Zebrun moves the story along easily and never predictably as the fateful event draws near and life-changing decisions are made. With his memorable cast and nicely underplayed big themes, Zebrun delivers a new and worthy perspective on the 9/11 experience. (Sept.)
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Review

Asim Zahid, the unassuming 19-year-old protagonist of Zebrun's refreshing 9/11 novel (after Someone You Know), is gay, runs a theater in Lackawanna, N.Y., and has a brother who has disappeared to Afghanistan to prepare for jihad. The book begins the week before 9/11 with Asim receiving an ominous delivery: a package from his brother, Tarik, containing the skull of a Jewish boy. As Tarik's motivations become clear, Asim finds something like comfort in a friendship with his dead father's ex-lover, Sonia. Both Asim and Sonia are steeped in isolation and depend on films to find context for their lives, comparing people to actors and real-life events to famous film scenes. Lackawanna, meanwhile, gets some big city problems--a priest is stabbed, a small business owner is murdered and a homemade bomb makes an appearance. Though some developments are a bit outlandish, Zebrun moves the story along easily and never predictably as the fateful event draws near and life-changing decisions are made. With his memorable cast and nicely underplayed big themes, Zebrun delivers a new and worthy perspective on the 9/11 experience. (Sept.) -- Publishers Weekly, August 11, 2008

Coming of age in a dying American town is hard enough. But if you're Middle Eastern and gay... It's early 2001 in the small industrial town of Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo. Asim Zahid is on the verge of adulthood and anxious to escape to the University of Michigan, but tying up loose ends at home as well as the prospect of a new love provide thorny obstacles. The new love is an improbably easygoing redhead named Billy, and the very ease of this budding relationship causes Asim to question it. The major loose end comes in the person of the fragile Sonia, whose sense of reality is skewed by a lifelong immersion in classic old films. The Latvian-born Sonia was the mistress of Asim's recently deceased father, and Asim promised to look after her as well as the Bethlehem Theater, the movie house which has been the family business for decades. Both Asim and Sonia have literally hundreds of films as reference points. (An early scene finds them comparing the relative merits of big-screen James Bonds, past and present.) Indeed, their film-viewing histories frame their observations of the world around them. While the chapters from Asim's perspective are bathed in longing, Sonia dreamily morphs memories of past films into her analysis of a bedside clock, a homeless man, Asim's current mood, etc. The third character in the family mix is Asim's angry brother Tarik, who impugns the sexuality of both Asim and his father (correctly, it turns out). Tarik, who also has his cinematic influences, may be edging into a terrorist cell, less from political conviction than from inner turbulence. Despite a dearth of plot, Zebrun's ruminative second novel captivates through the complexity and vulnerability of its characters and the excellence of its prose, polished to a luminous transparency. -- Kirkus, August 14, 2008

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Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: Alyson Books (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159350084X
• ISBN-13: 978-1593500849
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,424,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Slouching Towards Bethlehem, November 24, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Only the Lonely (Paperback)

I wound up liking this book quite a lot, but at first I found myself unexpectedly resistant, comparing it at every turn to John Updike's recent novel TERRORIST which shares some of the same themes and something of the same milieu. And really on almost every count TERRORIST was winning out. But then I let myself settle into Gary Zebrun's rhythms

The sadness of a decaying theater, the palace of dreams forced to face reality, is always seductive, though Zebrun doesn't do anything new with it, but who could after FOLLIES and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW made this such a ubermotif of the 1970s? Individual movie memories of Asim and Sonia are pleasing and poignant, but some of them fall flat. Zevrun tries hard to make something of the movies playing at the Bethlehem Theater in the weeks preceding 9/11, but GHOST WORLD and FROM HELL with Johnny Depp just don't have the emotional resonance that he tries to hang off of them. Sonia herself, the Russian mistress of Asim's dead father, is like a crazy Latvian scramble of Blanche DuBois and Mary Tyrone, the sort of part Simone Signoret was often forced to take in her old age, and reading her adventures here makes me wish Signoret was still with us for one last stab at an Oscar.

I always like a book with a good strong conflict between brothers, and the one between sectarian Tarik and the laissez-faire Asim is piping hot. Tarik can't stand the loose ways of the infidels in Lackawanna, and he finds evidence everywhere that his brother has defected to the side of the heathen. The brother walks around their home naked, when their religion says that it's sinful for one man to see another without his clothes (or even to look on one's own body while naked, even in a mirror). Both boys suffer from the lack of a cohesive family unit, and the whole suffering Rust Belt mentality of the citizens around them mirrors the familial disintegration in myriad ways. Sometimes the whole town seems thigh-high in vulgarity, random acts of violence, and the uncomfortable feeling of not enough padding between life and death.

I will look forward with interest to whatever Gary Zebrun decides to give us next, and I'll look backwards to find a copy of his first novel which somehow I missed out on.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, character-driven story may not be for everyone., October 31, 2008

By 

Bob Lind "camelwest" (Phoenix, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Only the Lonely (Paperback)

Asim Zahid is a 19 year old gay boy stuck in the steel industry blue collar town of Lakawanna NY, his plans to go away to college at least postponed temporarily by the unexpected death of his father, and Asim's decision to remain in town to run the family business, the town's old movie theatre. He lives with his sister, Masika, and a brother, Tarik, who has become a member of an Islam extremist group, in these days right before September 11, 2001. Also in Asim's life is Sonia, his father's former mistress, whose life revolves around the films she faithfully views at the movie theatre, and Billy, an Irish local who has become Asim's first lover. Each of them suffers from some degree of loneliness, with extremely different ways of coping with it. When Asim is threatened because of his unwillingness to aid Tarik's terrorist group, Billy tries to jump to his defense, but this is something that Asim knows he must deal with in his own way, as the calendar nears the day when everything will irrevocably change.

I enjoyed Zebrun's first novel, "Someone You Know," although I found it a bit dark. This is much more so, and a bit depressing for my taste. I also feel it somewhat reinforces small town America paranoia about people of Middle Eastern descent being suspected as terrorists. But the book itself is well-written, and nothing short of a masterpiece in the way it tells its story through the diverse emotions of the various characters. I'll give it four stars out of five.