The Kept Man [Hardcover]

Jami Attenberg (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 27, 2007

Now in paperback, from the author of the bestselling The Middlesteins: the novel that's "unabashedly emotional, refreshingly devoid of New York City cynicism, and tenderly funny?" (People).

Jarvis Miller's artist husband has been in a coma for six years. And so, Jarvis has spent these years suspended between hope and grief, paralyzed with longing for a life and a marriage that are slipping away. But then, unexpectedly, Jarvis makes her first new friends in years when she meets the Kept Man Club: three men whose lifestyles are funded by their successful wives, who gather once a week on laundry day. With their help, she reawakens to the city beyond her Brooklyn apartment, past the pitying eyes of her husband?s art dealer and his irresponsible best friend as her future begins to take on the irresistible tingles of possibility for the first time in almost a decade. When a shocking discovery casts a different light on her idealized marriage, she's propelled even further down a path that she would never have dared to imagine just months before. Tender, bold, and unabashed, The Kept Man is a compulsively readable novel about love and loss from one of our most dynamic new storytellers.
 

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this lugubrious first novel from Brooklynite Attenberg (Instant Love), Jarvis Miller is a young, pretty half-widow in the Williamsburg neighborhood. For six years, her brilliant painter husband, Martin Miller, has lain in a coma in a nursing home, while Jarvis rarely leaves the apartment for more than her once-a-week visit to see him. With frequent musings such as Waiting for Martin to wake up is a different kind of waiting than waiting for him to die, Jarvis slowly takes steps to go on with her life, and in the process, begins to suspect that her picture-perfect marriage may have been something else entirely. She finds little solace in Alice, Martin's glossy, possessive art dealer, or in Davis, Martin's louche artist friend. What helps the most is a serendipitous friendship with three married men she meets in a Laundromat, The Kept Men Club; the three are financially supported by their wives just as Jarvis, former party girl, was supported first by Martin, and now by his legacy. Attenberg gets the Williamsburg cityscape correct but builds almost zero tension with Jarvis's depressive brooding over Martin, his continued hold on her and the decisions she faces. Not for a moment in this airless dirge does Jarvis or her marriage feel credible. (Jan.)
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Review

“Attenberg has an admirable sense of fun...Displays a keen ear for dialogue and a half-cynical, half-affectionate tone that makes even the most venal characters likable.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Told with wit and verve.”
—Interview

“One finds a great deal to admire here... Ms. Attenberg [is] an able geographer of emotional landscapes.”
—New York Sun --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1 edition (December 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489521
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489525
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,026,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jami Attenberg is the author of Instant Love, The Kept Man, and The Melting Season. Her fourth book, The Middlesteins, will be published in October 2012. She has written for The New York Times, Details, Babble, Print, Salon, and many more publications. Visit her online at whatever-whenever.net.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Book January 22, 2008

By Julie Books

Format:Hardcover

THE KEPT MAN is a beautiful book about love and loss, and how people find themselves stuck and immobile. Attenberg nails modern day Brooklyn, the concept of the proxy urban family, and the art world, and sucks you right in with her stunning prose. Her narrator is compelling and wonderfully flawed and complex, and I read late into the night, unable to put the book down. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough, strong debut novel April 11, 2010

By Kathleen Warnock

Format:Hardcover

I've heard Jami Attenberg read a number of times; from the stuff she's already published, things she's working on, and stand-alone pieces, I could tell that this is the sort of person who takes her writing very seriously and does it well.

It was easy to put myself in her hands as I read "The Kept Man," and I trusted her writer's voice to take us where we needed to go. She wasn't afraid to make her protagonist someone who could be unlikable, and do stupid things; just like a real person. Jarvis is a difficult person, but that stands to reason, because she was married to a great, eccentric artist who was no angel himself. They fit together because of who they were and who they weren't.

Attenberg does a great job in merging the character's internal journey with the changes in her real landscape: the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn changing from artistic to gentrified over the course of weeks, months, and seasons. You can almost smell New York, and the specific identity of that particular Brooklyn neighborhood and the people in it. (Hipsters...and the people who got there before them).

The supporting characters are also well-drawn, from the nurses at the long-term care center where Jarvis's husband rests in a coma to Missy, the car service driver who becomes the best friend Jarvis has, the book feels real and true, and soemtimes that means it's not pretty. But it's good.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A life waiting mirrored on the page December 5, 2008

By Debra Hamel TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

As the first sentence of Jami Attenberg's prologue memorably notes, Jarvis Miller has been waiting for her husband to die for six years. Martin--an artist who isn't household-name famous but is known enough to have inspired a dissertation--has been comatose since he had an aneurism and fell off a ladder in his studio. The tragedy was great for his saleability: Jarvis isn't wanting for money, so she doesn't have to work. She doesn't have to do much of anything. She's just waiting. Unable to move forward because of her liminal status as not-quite-widow, she wallows in the past--visiting Martin, of course, but also poring over his paintings, smelling his shirts every day...still, six years on. (Though no expert in the patterns and longevity of grieving, this struck me while reading as not quite credible. And yet Jarvis is depressed and stuck, and so, I suppose, anything's possible.) Attenberg's narrative captures the period in Jarvis's life when events conspire to push her out of the holding pattern she's been mired in.

Jarvis's story is told in the first person in languorous prose, glimpses of her past with Martin related in patches of back story that interrupt the description-rich narrative of the present. The sluggish rhythm of Jarvis's life is mirrored on the page, in the book's unusually long sentences--there's one that's 162 words long in chapter five--asides segregated from the main thrust of a sentence with dashes: Attenberg makes good use of her punctuational toolbox. (If I'm not mistaken, these long sentences becomes less frequent later in the book, as Jarvis's life itself picks up speed.) Jarvis is a complex, imperfect character. She was saved by her relationship with Martin from a life that was rootless and trivial. Having adopted an identity as his wife, who is she when he is gone, neither living nor dead? That's part of her problem.

The Kept Man is not the lightest book, but it's not as depressing as the above probably suggests. A good--if not run-screaming-through-the-streets good--read. You're unlikely to be disappointed.

-- Debra Hamel