★ 01/11/2021
Livings, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize winner for the story collection The Dog, returns with a brilliant debut novel centering on a woman’s memories of a fatal blizzard that occurred in her childhood. Hazel Saltwater determines to rewrite the story of Albert Caldwell’s death after a party during the historic blizzard of 1978 in New York City when Hazel was six. (Her father, Erwin, has already published a blockbuster autobiographical novel about it called The Blizzard Party.) Hazel pieces together backstories of the pivotal players who attended the party, including the neurotic Erwin, transformed by guilt over a WWII experience; Caldwell, an astute lawyer plotting his suicide before succumbing to dementia; Turk Brunn, who runs an amusement park where visitors sign up to experience various forms of simulated abuse; and Turk’s father, Lazlo, a linguistic virtuoso whose research inadvertently made him psychotic. Livings’s genius resides in his ability to weave these disparate threads together through banal events (a Christmas tree jammed into an apartment’s garbage chute; the selling of a painting; a brawl in a diner), illuminating an intricate pattern that, for Hazel, predestines a dénouement that is startling to the reader. Livings calls to mind the work of Michael Chabon as he brings insight into the way events and circumstances shape his characters’ lives. This is one to savor. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners (Feb.)
09/01/2020
In February 1978, with New York City buried under the snows of a fierce nor'easter, Albert Haynes Caldwell, a partner emeritus of a fancy law firm, holds a party and plots to fake a medical emergency. Then he will throw himself into the river. From PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize winner Livings (The Dog); with a 30,000-copy first printing.
★ 2020-11-27
From acclaimed story writer Livings, a first novel that might be called a detour de force: sprawling, discursive, loose-limbed (and impressive).
Our narrator is Hazel Saltwater, daughter of a renowned and prodigiously phobic writer. At 6, she was the still center in the drugged-out maelstrom of a bash held by neighbors in the Apelles, her family's grand Upper West Side apartment building, on the snowy night of Feb. 6, 1978. While watching TV in a back bedroom, Hazel made the peculiar acquaintance of Albert Caldwell, an elderly ex-lawyer who, having confirmed his descent into dementia, earlier in the evening had staged an emergency, slipped away from the hospital, and stolen and crashed a cab on his way to drown himself in the Hudson River. Albert was interrupted in this plot by Vikram, a boy—later Hazel's husband—who delivered him back home to the Apelles and, it turns out, a yet more spectacular fate. That fate became the germ of Hazel's father's most famous book, which starred a fictional version of Hazel. The book we're reading, it soon emerges, is Hazel's own four-decades-later reconstruction of that night, which she treats as a Rosetta Stone to unlock every secret and explore every connection in her life before and since—and in the lives of all those constellated around her. The book ranges with supreme confidence from its titular setting to World War II Europe, 9/11, and beyond. Livings' nearest model may be the doorstop-sized novels of Tom Wolfe...and this book is similarly digressive, maximalist, and prone to old-fashioned manipulations of sentiment. Livings may not quite have Wolfe's journalistic chops, but he's a far more skillful and empathetic novelist, and what seems moralistic and preening in Wolfe's books reads here mostly as playful and nimble, if mildly self-indulgent. One may wonder why a first-time novelist in 2020 would follow the Wolfe/Balzac template for the Novel of Everything...but the fact is that Livings, amazingly, pulls it off.
An exuberant, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink pleasure.
This audiobook has it all—mystery, mayhem, and sci-fi in a story that flashes forward and back as it revels in the lost world of late 1970s Manhattan. Narrator Rebecca Lowman presents the many complex characters at just the right pace. She carefully delivers the various voices—male and female, accented and not—and keeps the reality-stretching doings moving along.” —AudioFile Magazine
"[The Blizzard Party] is a raucously inventive tale of loss and erasure told with an authorial assurance uncommon in a first novel . . . [Livings] is a nimble wordsmith . . . This rollickingly bleak rendering of 1970s New York is well worth a visit." ―JOHN FREEMAN GILL, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"An expansive, discursive novel...That the author somehow manages to fit it all together, puzzle-like, by the end is a feat of acrobatic storytelling... [The book] explores the minutiae to get to the big questions: What do our connections and actions and words mean in the end?" ―SAMANTHA SCHOECH, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"Every so often, a novel comes along that manages to capture the glorious, demented cacophony of New York City life―one of high highs, low lows, love and paranoia and neighborly angst and bizarro weirdness―and The Blizzard Party does just that, reminding us of the strange breed of people called New Yorkers. . . Livings is a master prose stylist―his voice hilarious, playful, shouting to the rafters, blinking with ingenious descriptions." ―CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN, INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
"[A] brilliant debut novel . . . Livings calls to mind the work of Michael Chabon as he brings insight into the way events and circumstances shape his characters' lives. This is one to savor." ―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
"[A] first novel that might be called a detour de force: sprawling, discursive, loose-limbed (and impressive) . . . Livings's nearest model may be the doorstop-sized novels of Tom Wolfe . . . and this book is similarly digressive, maximalist, and prone to old-fashioned manipulations of sentiment. Livings may not quite have Wolfe's journalistic chops, but he's a far more skillful and empathetic novelist, and what seems moralistic and preening in Wolfe's books reads here mostly as playful and nimble." ―KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
"[An] ambitious debut . . . [The Blizzard Party] features moments of brilliance, especially in the dialogue and the surprising connections. A literary feast." ―BOOKLIST
This audiobook has it all—mystery, mayhem, and sci-fi in a story that flashes forward and back as it revels in the lost world of late 1970s Manhattan. Narrator Rebecca Lowman presents the many complex characters at just the right pace. She carefully delivers the various voices—male and female, accented and not—and keeps the reality-stretching doings moving along. Lowman particularly illuminates the character of Hazel Saltwater, an introspective, damaged seer whose life is indelibly marked by events that take place on the night of February 6 during the Blizzard of ‘78. The plot stems from the drug-addled and dangerous goings-on in the Upper West Side Apelles building—itself a kind of character in this complex and metaphor-rich story. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
