3.0
The Astral
ByPublisher Description
From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man, a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn.
The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apartment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps others) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces.
Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.
The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apartment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps others) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces.
Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Kate Christensen's Blue Plate Special.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities28 Reviews
3.0
Jack Rummler
Created 11 months agoShare
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“I did enjoy this book a lot but it’s just not something I ultimately sitting with after finishing. like the language and pacing and plot movement is great (albeit the first half really hooks but the second half slows down) but by the end I just really do not care about any of the characters and the circumstances in which they ended up in”
Jessica Jeffers
Created almost 2 years agoShare
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Chloe Hasson
Created about 2 years agoShare
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annmariereads
Created over 5 years agoShare
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Eva Kaul
Created over 5 years agoShare
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“I was entirely prepared to dislike this book, and nearly put it aside several times in the first one hundred pages feeling, as another reviewer put it, "Who cares?" I disliked the narrator. I found him pretentious and insufferable. But, for reasons I am still not entirely clear about, I stuck with this book, and somewhere around the halfway point, I realized that some of the passages were downright brilliant, truly 5 star writing, and I was only able to appreciate their brilliance because I'd been willing to stick around for the onerous first many chapters. Unfortunately, these brilliant passages would often be followed by another less than amazing section, but I was now curious enough to stick around. It all averaged out to a 4 star read ultimately.
I am fascinated with Kate Christensen's writing after this and the one other book of hers my library owns, The Last Cruise. That book was an exhaustive description of the food and decor and inner workings of a cruise ship bound for disaster, but she kept all of the characters at arm's length and I never really felt I knew or cared about any of them. The Astral showed me that she can take the reader inside the characters' heads and relationships with uncomfortable precision, dissecting them the same way she did the menu on the cruise ship in The Last Cruise, although at times it still felt more like a tongue in cheek intellectual exercise than a immersive emotional involvement with the characters.
My favorite parts may have been My final comment is that I don't particularly appreciate the sexual commentary, either in this novel or her other. Regardless of if it's supposed to be coming from a man, woman, elderly, young, whatever, it always sounds like adults conversing at the level of junior high kids about sex to me. Not a deal breaker, but irritating.”
About Kate Christensen
KATE CHRISTENSEN is the author of five previous novels, most recently Trouble. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, Elle, and Open City. She lives in New York City.
Other books by Kate Christensen
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