“My poor family was in shambles.

It had not always been thus. Ten years before, we’d been a solid unit, dollhouse style, mother, father, boy, and girl.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (AUG 1, 2011)

The Astral, by Kate Christensen, gets its title by way of its namesake, the Astral building in Brooklyn, New York. This building houses the protagonist of this book, an aging poet named Harry Quirk. His last name befits him and his family. They are interestingly dysfunctional in many ways.

Harry was once a somewhat well-known poet, teaching poetry workshops and writing his lyrical poems in rhyming and sonnet style. His publisher and mentor has moved to Europe and his style is now out of favor in the United States. His wife, Luz, decides after thirty years of marriage that Harry is having an affair with his best friend, Marion. Despite Harry’s pleading innocence – and he is innocent – Luz does not believe him and she kicks him out of their apartment in the Astral. It is true that Harry did have an affair twelve years ago with a young poetry student, but since that time he has been true to Luz.

Now homeless and without a job, Harry gets a room in a local flophouse and spends his days drinking at a local watering hole named Maureen’s. He finally lands a job at a Hasidic lumber yard through his crack-smoking Hasidic musician friend, Yanti. Here Harry works in accounts payable and is able to rent a one room apartment in the Astral. He figures that if he lives in the Astral, he’ll be closer to Luz and better able to keep an eye on her comings and goings. He is unable to accept that things are over with Luz and he is determined to win her back.

Harry’s daughter, Karina, is a freegan – she believes in getting all of her possessions for free. She gathers discarded things from the curbside, dumpster dives and goes to supermarket and restaurant trash bins to pick up food. She is very clear that the food she picks up consists only of tossed items with expired dates or unused edibles.

Harry’s son, Hector, is living on a commune and mired in a cult called Children of Hashem. They believe that the Messiah will be coming soon or is already here. Hector is being groomed as the new messiah and also is preparing to marry Christa, the cult’s leader. Karina and Harry want to do an intervention, hoping to get Hector out of the cult.

This is, in its way, a parody of today’s life and also a mirror of what is going on within a certain group of people. These people all live in a little area in Brooklyn and have been friends since the 1970’s. Despite Brooklyn being in New York City, this neighborhood is its own little enclave with everyone gossiping about everyone else. The friends are all interconnected, to the point of all of them seeing the same therapist. The novel makes a big deal of this and the unethical practice of Helen, the therapist they share.

The novel reminded me of what Zoe Heller does so well in her writing and what Christensen tries hard to accomplish but doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off. The parody comes off as stilted and without subtlety. For good parody to work, the reader must be able to see him or herself, or someone they can identify with, in the characters or culture. This doesn’t happen here. The characters are very black and white without hues of gray. For instance, Harry is a complete atheist and Hector and Luz are absolute believers. Things are described as either right or wrong. Luz is a moralistic bully while Harry is a moderate and giving guy. There is a lot of repetition of subject matter as if the author is not sure that the reader remembers what has transpired earlier.

Despite its flaws, Christensen can draw a good description and give frailty to the characters she creates. There is pathos, narcissism, stupidity, and a distinct humor to some of the characters and their situations. Though the book didn’t work for me as well as I’d have hoped, I think that a lot of readers would appreciate it more than I did.

I am a fan of Christensen’s and loved Trouble and The Epicure’s Lament. I continue to look forward to her writings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Christensen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: Trouble The Great Man

Bibliography:

• In the Drink (1999)
• Jeremy Thrane (2001)
• The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
• The Great Man (2007)
• Trouble (2009)
• The Astral (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (July 2013)

“Just then, I caught a reflection of a woman in the tilted gilt-edged mirror across the room. She was dressed similarly to me, so I tilted my head to get a better look at her. As I did so, the woman tilted her head to match the movement of mine. I raised my wineglass; she raised hers along with me.

It was then, in that instant, that I knew my marriage was over.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (SEP 5, 2009)

Josie is in trouble, much more trouble than she’d ever imagined. She’s in the kind of trouble that eats you up from the inside out, not the kind where you worry about being harmed by outsiders. She is also feeling a sense of sexual freedom and wanting to explore these feelings. This book is best read in a cool place with the air conditioning on – no tight bodices and no long sleeves!

Early in the book she is attending a party, flirting with a stanger, when she looks in a mirror and has an epiphany – – she is going to divorce her husband. She realizes that her marriage of about twenty years is unsatisfying and that she has been sublimating herself the whole time. She remembers the good times she’s had with her husband and realizes that even those were not so great. “We had been good drinking buddies, my husband and I. I remembered sitting hunkered down in a bar years ago, our heads close together, talking and drinking and smoking. Of course, he had done the lion’s share of all three, but I had tried to keep up”.  She worries about her teenaged daughter, Wendy, and the effect that a divorce will have on her. She and Wendy have not been getting along and Josie thinks that Wendy will choose to live with Anthony which will be a huge loss for Josie.

Josie is a psychotherapist in the Chelsea District of Manhattan. She has an upscale practice with educated and insightful clientele. When the book opens, tomorrow is the last day of her practice before she takes her annual two week vacation. She is looking forward to it. She plans to tell her husband and Wendy that she wants a divorce, then find an apartment and move out. She manages to tell Anthony she wants a divorce and they both act oh, so civilized, not a loud voice to be heard. Josie feels “nothing but relief and a slight sadness at the end of my marriage, the emotional equivalent of getting a rotten tooth pulled”.   As she searches for apartments, she is interrupted by a phone call from her closest friend Raquel, a famous rock singer, who is in Mexico City. She wants Josie to come and stay with her, to spend the next two weeks in Mexico City helping her deal with her stresses.

Josie goes to Mexico to be with Raquel who is very emotionally fragile. Raquel has a history of heroin addiction and once came close to dying from an overdose. She’s been in rehab multiple times but has been clean for the past ten years. Despite being in recovery now, her recovery is fragile. Raquel feels like a has-been even though she is putting out a new recording. It is strange to see the two of them drinking and carousing as they do. It would seem that  Josie, a psychotherapist, would be more aware of the dangers of relapse when her friend is drinking so much, but this is not the case. Together they party and spend time with the artists and literati of Mexico City. Josie meets a man who she finds so sexually exciting that she can barely contain herself.

It is here in Mexico City that the real story begins. Josie realizes how much she has repressed herself in her marriage and needs to escape its confines. She comes to the realization that “Anthony had been a seemingly irresistible force I had passively allowed to carry me off; I hadn’t had to think about anything. I had been young, naive, and overwhelmed by the power of his personality. I had subsumed myself in him”.   We also see that she is torn between taking care of Raquel and meeting her own needs. She is intensely drawn to a younger man for whom she feels a huge sexual attraction. She tries to meet her own needs and also care for Raquel but falls short on managing both.

The novel is told from Josie’s first person viewpoint. It catches the reader right from the start. We watch Josie’s “tectonic psyche . . . shifting and heaving” along with huge changes in her outer landscape. She has a lot to do, to learn, and to experience as she moves on in her life. Nothing is going to stop her as she tries to help her friend while also trying to understand what went wrong in her marriage. At the same time, she unfetters herself, shaking off the sexual repression that has governed her life for too long.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 63 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 16, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Christensen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: The Great Man The Astral More on female sexual freedom: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Frarell Confessions of a Bigamist by Kate Lehrer The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa Peyton Amberg by Tama Janowitz

Bibliography:

• In the Drink (1999)
• Jeremy Thrane (2001)
• The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
• The Great Man (2007)
• Trouble (2009)
• The Astral (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (July 2013)