Pretend All Your Life [Hardcover]

Joseph L. Mackin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2010

In the eerie winter after New York's most famous day, enigmatic egoist Dr. Richard Gallin has no end of troubles. A success on his own terms Park Avenue plastic surgeon, father, art collector, libertine Gallin is suddenly hard-pressed to hold on to his place in a post-9/11 world he hardly recognizes.

And it's not just Richard Gallin whose identity is in flux. The turmoil in New York has tilted the surface of the world's greatest city, and everybody is scrambling for opportunity. Take the enterprising journalist seeking strange justice, the Wall Street dissembler hoping for new life, a Nicaraguan rebel conjuring his American dream, the beautiful wife trapped by her perfect penthouse sky...

Twists ensue that only the unleashed desires of these human hearts could produce as someone close asks Gallin to do something he could never be prepared to do. Just as he asks another to do what was previously unthinkable.

Pretend All Your Life takes place in just six days, during which the dilemmas these characters face echo many of the major questions of our time about responsibility, beauty, identity, ambition, and love. An incisive, surprise-filled portrait of a place and a people on the verge, this is an unforgettable debut novel that resounds with life at a defining moment in history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mackin's bleak debut traces six disastrous days in the life of Dr. Richard Gallin, a plastic surgeon living in post-9/11 New York City. Gallin is besieged on all fronts: his practice is hemorrhaging money, his personal life is in shambles, he is the subject of an upcoming exposé for his decision to fire an HIV-positive assistant, and his case of middle-aged ennui is compounded by the death of his son, Bernardo, who worked in one of the twin towers. As Mackin puts the screws to Gallin, things quickly go from bad to worse. Gallin is a grade-A jerk and is so rooted in the past that his present barely exists, and while Mackin has a hard time building sympathy for him, the secondary characters are reliably excellent and provide the book's best moments. By the end, old sorrows will be aired again and combined with fresh disasters as the troupe of damaged New Yorkers stumble toward the tragic conclusion. (Apr.)
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Review

The best reflection on post-9/11 America written to date. It is, in short, a powerful and moving book on what may well be the most difficult of subjects for Americans to ponder. --Marc Schuster, Small Press Reviews (added by author)

Pretend All Your Life is a book that proves what we ve always preached about novels to our unconverted friends. At their best, novels ensnare the reader with a powerful story, make us care about the characters, and illustrate greater truths about of the world around us. Pretend All Your Life does all of this. For readers looking for a good story, this is a clever little book with a thriller-paced plot. For readers looking to understand the problems in America s big cities, this is a close-to-the-bone examination of the chasms that exist within densely-packed Manhattan. Not since Sherman Alexie s Indian Killer has this reviewer come across a novel that meets the needs of both kinds of readers so well, and not since Don DeLillo s Fallen Man has an author so successfully used the 9/11 catastrophe as a narrative device for probing the good, the bad, and ugly of Manhattan. This is a very satisfying book. --New York Journal of Books

Written over a period of 6 days, Pretend All Your Life will make you think, sigh and ponder the lives of those within the pages of this exceptional book, as well as your own. How far would you go for love? Exactly what limits would you transcend to ensure their happiness at the risk of your own? Pretend All Your Life will challenge your answers. In a nutshell? Brilliant. Simply brilliant. --Luxuryreading.com

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: Permanent Press (April 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579621961
• ISBN-13: 978-1579621964
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,900,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joseph Mackin received an MA in Literature from New York University, and has studied writing at Yale and at the IEN in Barcelona, Spain. He was the original Internet editor of The Paris Review under the direction of George Plimpton, and has since developed a number of successful Internet ventures. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and son.

Pretend All Your Life is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strong surprise of a book, May 24, 2010

By 

Patrick J. Barrett - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pretend All Your Life (Hardcover)

A strong surprise of a book, this work is is a stone-hard story about living while dying, and about what it means to need and not to. The images Mackin presents are striking and original, and will linger in your mind long after you've finished the novel. This is a story you have not been told.

The prose is lithe and becoming, sly but always honest. He will tell you things you know but don't say, and things you say but don't know. And if you listen right, there's a heart in this story that beats louder than the noises that keep you from hearing your own. This novel reads like a Dostoevsky introduction to Robert Franks' snapshots of that great American sadness that we have never been able to distinguish from wealth. It is relentless but never tiring, it thinks without being meditative, and speaks, but never louder than truth is spoken.

As you choke with Gallin on the bright sick air or smell with Miguel the smoldering of hope or writhe with Bernardo in the empty space of fear, you know you are in the hands of a writer that claims honor for his craft. This book has all the death and wideness of a clear October afternoon and all the warmth of its evening. It should not be missed

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing and dark Post-9/11 Novel, April 9, 2010

By 

Amy Steele (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pretend All Your Life (Hardcover)

Remember all the dark thoughts many people harbored after 9/11--despair, grief, revenge, survival, protection and opportunity? In Pretend All Your Life, erudite wordsmith Joseph Mackin thoroughly taps into them. At times unsettling, Pretend All Your Life is pierced with hopeful moments. It delves into loss and reinvention. There are also those who saw 9/11 as the chance to try new projects, personas, careers, starts. Dr. Richard Gallin is an art collector, plastic surgeon and man with vast wealth. So much that he doesn't know what to do with it sometimes. His only child Bernardo, who worked in finance, died in the Towers that morning, his wedding ring found among the wreckage. Gallin finds he's no longer alone in his turmoil. The entire city has strangely transformed as its inhabitants and the rest of the nation cope with the unimaginable loss, frustration and new vulnerability. When Gallin's son appears one night with a unique proposal for his father, Gallin's world gets turned upside down. Amidst the tragedy, Mackin finds a sense of logic and renewal for his characters. The end result is the potent, refreshing post-9/11 novel Pretend All Your Life.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging Tale of a Post-9/11 Pretender, April 1, 2010

By 

Kevin Joseph (McLean, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Pretend All Your Life (Hardcover)

Set in New York City during the year following 9/11, Joseph Mackin's Pretend All Your Life examines this calamity's lingering impact on the life of plastic surgeon Richard Gallin and his family. Still reeling from the death of his wife and believing that his twenty-something son lies lost amidst the ruins of the World Trade Center, Gallin finds himself unable to sustain his once-lucrative medical practice or maintain a meaningful relationship with another woman. Things grow more complicated when his lost son mysteriously reapppears with a maddening request, and the gay partner of his former nurse, whom Gallin fired because he contracted AIDS, threatens to destroy his reputation. With a set-up this tantalizing and a cast of vividly drawn characters who spring to life on the page, I quickly got caught up in this novel, its only weakness seeming to be the author's occasional tendency to over-write.

I also admired the way in which Mackin took advice Gallin had given to his son ("Pretend to be a thing all of your life . . . and at the end of your life that's what you'll have been -- the thing you pretend to be") and used it as the central theme and title of his story. Gallin, a pretender in so many ways that by the end of the book I had no idea what he truly stands for or believes in, finds his advice turned completely on its head by his son, who is determined to abandon everything about his pretend life as a successful Wall Street investment banker to begin a new, honest existence.

This novel was well on its way to five stars when it came to a rather abrupt ending. It was almost as if Mackin lost interest in his novel at the very moment when his plot and characters had hit full stride. I can appreciate a good ambiguous ending and the lingering thoughts it can leave behind, but this one came too early for the plot or themes of this work to germinate to my full satisfaction.