Harvey Freedenberg

Stephen McCauley’s bittersweet seventh novel gives the lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s pronouncement that there are no second acts in American lives. Because for all their missteps, the angst-ridden characters that populate My Ex-Life seem determined, in their endearingly flawed ways, to make the best of their unique circumstances.

Most of the novel’s action unfolds in the slightly shabby seaside resort of Beauport, just north of Boston. It’s home to Julie Fiske and her restless daughter, Mandy, who’s on the cusp of high school graduation. In the midst of a fractious divorce and pressured by her husband to sell the rambling home they once shared, Julie reaches out to her first ex-husband, David Hedges, a college admissions consultant, in a desperate bid to help her daughter and bring order to the chaos of her life. David left Julie three decades earlier after discovering his true sexual orientation, and he now lives in San Francisco, where he faces his own real estate crisis—an impending eviction.

McCauley seasons the novel with a liberal helping of the anxieties of contemporary American life, chief among them upper-middle-class parents’ apprehension about their children’s futures and aging baby boomers’ regret that life’s brass ring will always be just out of reach. He excels in some wickedly funny scenes that depict Julie’s fumbling efforts to turn her home into an economically productive Airbnb, as well as a tender portrayal of the odd sexual tension that bubbles up during Julie and David’s reunion. They’re the sort of people who know their lives possess all the ingredients for happiness, but who seem to have lost the recipe. For all the idiosyncrasies of McCauley’s creations, it’s likely many readers will see aspects of their own lives reflected in these pages.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A school shooting: four dead, six wounded. It’s the stuff of our society’s worst recurring nightmare. And it provides the backdrop for Oliver Loving, Stefan Merrill Block’s moving third novel, the story of one family’s struggle to cope with the devastating aftermath of such a tragedy.

Nearly 10 years after he’s shot in the head at the high school homecoming dance in the small West Texas town of Bliss, Oliver Loving, now 27, lies paralyzed and mute at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. His parents’ marriage fractured long ago, and his younger brother wrestles with the nearly impossible challenge he’s set for himself: finding the words to tell his brother’s story in a way that will, if only figuratively, bring him back to life. A glimmer of hope that Oliver may be emerging from his locked-in state only thrusts the Lovings deeper into crisis.

Block peels away the layers of concealment, both personal and communal, that have masked the truth about what led Hector Espina Jr., a recent graduate of the high school, to return one otherwise uneventful evening with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and wreak havoc on an entire town. But in contrast to the sensationalism of our ritualized news coverage, this is a ruminative novel whose accumulating emotional force depends on the acuteness of Block’s patient character development and the unassuming grace of his prose.

As periodic eruptions of gun violence surface randomly and inexplicably across our national landscape, it seems the horror of one is barely grasped before the next arrives. For all the intensity of our collective desire to move on from each of these human-inflicted disasters, Oliver Loving soberly reminds us that there are people left behind for whom the grief and pain will never disappear.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The toll of addiction and the burden it inflicts on families dealing with that curse are the difficult subjects of Lindsay Hunter’s bleak second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

When Greg Reinart’s son, GJ, goes missing for three weeks, the retired accountant wearily crams himself into a compact RV and drives from his West Virginia home to Florida to search for the 30-year-old, who’s cycled through multiple visits to rehab and failed efforts at recovery most of his adult life. In Florida, Greg also must deal with a mountain of unfinished business remaining after his long-ago divorce from GJ’s mother, Marie. “Parents of the Lost, a species all their own,” is how Greg thinks of himself and his ex-wife.

As Hunter reveals through Greg’s eyes, the damage wreaked by GJ’s drug use has infected his father’s life. Greg’s fondness for junk food gradually has turned him into a “lump with eyes,” and his own drinking has become problematic. In his despair he fantasizes about putting his arms around his son, bitterly envisioning them at “Rock bottom, but together.”

Mirroring the darkness of the novel, Hunter’s Florida is not a place of gleaming beaches and stately palm trees. Instead, it’s world of strip malls and strip clubs, a twilight land through which Greg wanders, following a trail of increasingly faint clues to GJ’s whereabouts as his own demons pursue him. “Why did we choose each other? Why did we choose this life?” Marie asks as she and Greg pick over the wreckage of their former life.

Eat Only When You’re Hungry is far from a comforting read. Instead, it’s a starkly realistic portrait of a family in crisis, a journey through purgatory with precious few road signs to help the travelers on their way.