Amazon.com Review
"In the junk business, we collect the ugly with the beautiful, the bizarre with the elegant, the valuable with the worthless, sometimes forgetting which is which, or intentionally inverting them." The speaker is Richard, a.k.a. "Junk," the proprietor of Satori Junk in Detroit, Michigan, and also the protagonist of Michael Zadoorian's terrific first novel, Second Hand. As the novel opens, Richard is facing a crisis in his life: his mother is dying of cancer and he and his sister are already disagreeing about how to handle the estate. When mom finally passes on, brother and sister begin a tug of war over her belongings that's as much about philosophy as it is about taste:
"Richard dear," Linda says, in her mock-sincere voice, touching my hand, not in a warm way, but a way calculated to make me feel some sibling obligation, "I don't really care if things get a good home. I would just like to be done with all this. I'd like to get rid of this stuff, sell the house and get on with my life."
Richard, on the other hand,
does care, and begins a careful excavation of the "junk" his parents left behind. At the same time, he meets Theresa, an eccentric young woman with a horrific job: putting animals to sleep at the local humane society. Though the theme of unwanted animals as junk isn't exactly subtle, Zadoorian doesn't belabor the point, choosing instead to focus on the terrible toll that Theresa's work takes on her personal life.
As Richard and Theresa's relationship becomes both more intimate and more complicated, each takes refuge in private obsessions. For Richard, it is the history of his parents' marriage as revealed by the things they left behind; for Theresa, it is the Mexican Day of the Dead, whose promise of forgiveness alternately tempts and torments her. There's breaking up, making up, and a little philosophizing in between as these two junkyard lovers navigate the rocky road to romance, but Zadoorian does a terrific job of seamlessly weaving all the disparate threads into his narrative. By turns comic and wrenching, Second Hand builds incrementally to an emotional wallop that is as unexpected as it is effective. As Richard and Theresa finally realize their own true value in each others' eyes, Richard remarks, "our lives are lived in these moments, certain seconds here and there, snapshots only we can see and remember, in the way only we can remember them. They are the bric-a-brac of our lives." In the end, junk proves the perfect medium for Zadoorian to explore his characters' emotional lives. --Alix Wilber
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
A hipster junk-store owner narrates Zadoorian's debut novel, a paean to the funky charms and emotional meanings of retro-kitsch objects. Richard, disillusioned by the pretentiousness of art school, is a happy-to-be-going-nowhere the sort of hero made popular by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity and About a Boy, and he's satisfied trolling Detroit's thrift stores, estate and garage sales for '50s-style bowling shirts, porkpie hats and antique LPs. His store, Satori Junk, reflects his belief in the ability of secondhand objects to illuminate life and provide a kind of nonemotional connection. ("When I die, I'll leave nothing but junk," the story begins.) Occasionally endowed with moments of genuinely witty vulnerability that save the narrative from becoming too flip, Richard's self-willed complacency is shattered by a series of events. First, his mother dies, and going through stuff in his parents' house, he comes across some items that move the cool connoisseur to tears. Then, after having gone years without a girlfriend, he meets and falls for Theresa Zulinski, the yin to his yang, a "junk goddess" who frequently scares him with her mercurial personality and penchant for skeletons. The ups and downs of melodrama can breed ennui, however, and like Johnson with London, when Richard is tired of junk he is tired of life. But a pilgrimage to Mexico during the Days of the Dead soon revives his spirits, granting him a new perspective. Related in short vignettes like a series of slides in a home movie, the narrative could serve as a handbook for recognizing hidden gems at flea markets. But it's something more: incisively humorous and surprisingly poignant, this is a quirky, surprisingly tender coming-of-age tale. Agent, Lori Pope for the Faith Childs Literary Agency. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
