Customer Reviews

The Sky Below

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book starts off promisingly; it focuses on the shattering of a sensitive child's world after his father abandons the family and they lose their (to the child's eyes) magical house in New England and are forced to live in a redneck Florida town where his mother manages a motel. The prose is quite wonderful, and we follow the protagonist as he becomes an artist and writer of obituaries in the bohemian world of New York City in the late '90s and early naughts. But the book degenerates into a symbol-laden mystical mumbo-jumbo that is just plain silly. Neither the protagonist nor the other characters ever emerge as fully-formed human beings...a disappointment.

This novel received a lot of praise from the press but I found the novel frustratingly soulless. Gabriel the main protaganist lurches from one thing to the next in an incomprehensible manner. The novel charts his progress from an eight year old boy in Massachusetts, to Florida, Arizona, New York and Mexico. His character changes with each location. Obviously D'Erasmo's phantasmagoric style appeals to some but I found the novel cold and uninspiring and for a non American depressingly tedious reading about a country and people without soul or substance.

A selfish and manipulate cad is the narrator of The Sky Below, a drama that centers on the spiritual and emotional development of Gabriel Collins, a sexually ambiguous young man who spends much of his life haunted by the sudden disappearance of his father from their home in Bishop, Massachusetts. An artist, Gabriel's early life is shadowed by his mother's tales of mythological gods, especially that of Tereus, a half-bird, half-warrior and her bottles of food coloring and their symphony of blue and red in the kitchen sink. With no money and mired in debt, the family leave for Florida where Gabriel and his older sister Caroline help their mother run The Sunburst, a rundown motel, in front of a two-lane highway.

While mother takes charge of the motel with a vengeance, preoccupied with just trying to scrape out a living, Gabriel soon learns the monetary value of sex, pleasuring strange men at bust station bathrooms and sell drugs with his best school friend, the overweight Jenny with her cherry-red windbreaker. But for Gabriel life at the Sunburst feels like purgatory, "a hot scrubby drive to nowhere" and he aches for his life back in Bishop, where his masterpiece, The City was made from opened Christmas boxes, and torn wrapping paper and murals. A type of mythical beast that gradually grows and metamorphoses, Gabriel's life gradually becomes a series of allegorical boxes. Even as he remains caught in his Dad's enormous, spectral grip, his transistor radio the only remnants that his dad ever existed, the scrappy dollar notes and the stolen trinkets kept in shoe boxes under the bed, eventually jumpstart Gabriel's new life in Manhattan.

Living in an apartment in 7th street and working near to the Stock Exchange, and the shadowy blocks in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Gabriel meets the aging author Fluer, and helps her write her Stolen Girls series of books, while his freezer steadily fills with nice, cold, foil-wrapped bricks of money, courtesy of his new and wealthy benefactor. A natural schemer, Gabriel is confronted with enormous challenges, especially the affordability of a house on Pineapple street that he'd always wanted and was sure he was going to get. It's also not surprising then that the inevitable occurs making him question his relationship with his wealthy lover Janos and the strangely inappropriate intimate friendship with his best friend Sarah who leaves him for a puppeteer.

Heavily symbolic, this novel is about one man's spiritual journey as he tries to find a place for himself in the world. Gabriel's trajectory through New York and then onto Ixtlan, Mexico is loaded with surprises. Discontented, disconnected, and even vengeful, Gabe is not a very likeable character. And it is his internal battles that emotionally drain the reader even as a rare form of cancer, like a lion roars through him, his life becoming like a series of fractuals, each fragmenting into kaleidoscopic parts, some vivid, some murky, some jagged, and all consecutively plummeting, changing and whirling. D'erasmo's prose proves is as dense and as multi-colored as the constantly shifting skies that mirror Gabriel's life like some vast motion of which Gabe can only see a small part. While the final section in Ixtlan goes on a bit long, this novel is mostly a gorgeously evocative account of one man's lonely struggles as Gabriel, seduced by love and creativity, tries to fervently resolve his emotional inner demons. Mike Leonard March 2009.

I heard about this book I think in the "New York Review of Books" podcasts, which is an excellent podcast by the way. I wanted to like the book because the author sounded interesting (a reviewer of books I believe) and I liked the story's premise. I read the first few pages in the bookstore. The writing was excellent so I bought it.

I got home and couldn't follow the plot.

The book is like a movie made with great shots and scenes but edited together in a way that confuses. The writer relocates you so you feel a bit like a Star Trek crew member caught in a transporter beam; jumbled and trapped between worlds.

I think the author is trying to take us on a journey of transformation. The main character can't let go of his past (his father's desertion of the family) which comes out in all kinds of twisted ways, from his being a adolescent thief to offering himself sexually to men at a Florida bus station. This is where the book is good--the character is alive and real. It is his transformative journey that is unconvincing.

The Mexico scenes are bazar. The author relies on near magic to turn our thief into a moral character, albeit and an even crazier one. The tribal life transforms him into an earth grounded heterosexual and lifts the cancer from his leg in the form of a bird's egg. (This is when the book really started to lose me, though I think I fell off sometime during the irrational ride to Mexico.)

Inevitably he heads back to New York City's erect skyscrapers and steel. Though his boyfriend e-mailed a "Dear John" letter, he was ready in the wings to take him back. (Wings have a weird role in this book. I think they represent transformation but all the wing scenes seemed like they belonged in a "Harry Potter" book.)

The adolescent mind ramblings of this really weird guy don't seem to mature despite his cancer diagnosis and the magic of some indigo Mexican child who likes a cave with burnt dead people in it. I was mad at the book because given its reliance on the mystical, I think I was supposed to be left at the end with an "Ah ha!" but I only got a "Huh?"'

I don't love magical realism, but the writing in this book was so beautiful that I more than forgave the author.
This is the kind of book where you will want to stop and re-read sentences and paragraphs again, because it is so well written.

Do not ignore the opening sentence: "When did I first stumble into the wrong grove?" Unlike the two-star reviewer's assessment of this novel, the opening chapter, "The House," sets the tone and provides the symbolism for the rest of this very unusual novel. It is what the reader needs for the rest of the novel which is, in my opinion, brilliant writing. This is essentially a story about a boy's and then the man's need to find his father, one of those universal themes in literature. So, reader, be very much aware of the ingredients you are provided in this opening chapter where young Gabe is living in Massachusetts with his mother and sister, where the three of them create a fantasy world and where the distant father decides to abandom them, leaving behind his collection of guitars and other items, not the least of which is his radio with its dial stuck in one place. Gabe carries that radio with him, first to Florida when his mother is forced to leave the house he adores.
This is a magical book. And I am not that fond of books that venture into the fantasy world. But this novel works so well that the reader just floats along, starting with the swamp in Florida and ending with a great adventure in Mexico.
Gabe is our narrator. And while living in Florida, he begins his life of what at first are small crimes. And then will come the bigger ones.
Then as an adult he becomes a journalist of sorts, writing obituaries for a truly awful New York City newspaper. And that is where he meets a wonderful character, the author of a series of trashy novels that have been so popular, consuming forests for the paper to print them, that she has been able to purchase many wonderful houses. And then something happens which requires the skills--if writing trashy novels necessitates skills--Gabe has. But we know, of course, he does because he is our narrator.
Gabe is gay, or sort of homosexual. I'll not tell you more. You'll find out.
It's a wonderful book and the first I have read by Stacey d'Erasmo.