Will Watt and Mike Ortego provide the main narration of this novel about the multigenerational impact of the Armenian Genocide. The story blends the worlds of wrestling and backgammon with scenes of political intrigue and violence. Both narrators do not overemphasize the most devastating moments, focusing listeners' attention upon the effects of historical events on the course of everyday lives. Watt illuminates the tensions that arise from cousins Avo and Ruben's participation in Armenian causes. Ortego adeptly captures former wrestler Terry's canny but thoughtful tone as he reflects on managing Avo's wrestling career in the U.S. and on the loss of his younger brother. Mary Jane Wells reveals Avo's former girlfriend, Mina's unease with Ruben in the only chapter she narrates. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
The Gimmicks: A Novel
Narrated by Will Watt, Mike Ortego, Mary Jane Wells
Chris McCormickUnabridged — 11 hours, 24 minutes
The Gimmicks: A Novel
Narrated by Will Watt, Mike Ortego, Mary Jane Wells
Chris McCormickUnabridged — 11 hours, 24 minutes
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Overview
“The Gimmicks is a gorgeous epic that astounds with its scope and beauty. With empathy and humor, McCormick unravels the ties between brotherhood and betrayal, love and abandonment, and the fictions we create to live with the pain of the past. This novel will blow you away.”-Brit Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers
Set in the waning years of the Cold War, a stunning debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history-the Armenian Genocide-whose traumatic reverberations will have unexpected consequences on all three lives.
This exuberant, wholly original novel begins in Kirovakan, Armenia, in 1971. Ruben Petrosian is a serious, solitary young man who cares about two things: mastering the game of backgammon to beat his archrival, Mina, and studying the history of his ancestors. Ruben grieves the victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, a crime still denied by the descendants of its perpetrators, and dreams of vengeance.
When his orphaned cousin, Avo, comes to live with his family, Ruben's life is transformed. Gregarious and physically enormous, with a distinct unibrow that becomes his signature, Avo is instantly beloved. He is everything Ruben is not, yet the two form a bond they swear never to break.
But their paths diverge when Ruben vanishes-drafted into an extremist group that will stop at nothing to make Turkey acknowledge the genocide. Unmoored by Ruben's disappearance, Avo and Mina grow close in his absence. But fate brings the cousins together once more, when Ruben secretly contacts Avo, convincing him to leave Mina and join the extremists-a choice that will dramatically alter the course of their lives.
Left to unravel the threads of this story is Terry “Angel Hair” Krill, a veteran of both the US Navy and the funhouse world of professional wrestling, whose life intersects with Avo, Ruben, and Mina's in surprising and devastating ways.
Told through alternating perspectives, The Gimmicks is a masterpiece of storytelling. Chris McCormick brilliantly illuminates the impact of history and injustice on ordinary lives and challenges us to confront the spectacle of violence and the specter of its aftermath.
Editorial Reviews
10/21/2019
McCormick’s rambling debut novel (after the story collection Desert Boys) shows the continued influence of the Armenian genocide of 1915 far into the 20th century. The author dramatizes how it affects three teenage characters growing up in a village in Soviet Armenia in the 1970s: Ruben Petrosian, a teenager who lives to play backgammon; Mina Bagossian, his gaming rival; and Avo Gregoryan, Ruben’s cousin, who’s bigger than most kids and comes to live with the Petrosian family after the death of his parents in an industrial accident. Despite being opposites, both physically and temperamentally, the two cousins become as close as brothers, just as Avo and Mina fall in love. Ruben and Avo are eventually recruited by a secret Armenian liberation group that seeks vengeance for the 1915 genocide. Forced to leave Mina behind, Avo is sent to America, where he grows disillusioned with the cause and becomes—what else, given his size—a professional wrestler. In 1989, Mina contacts Avo’s former wrestling manager to find out what happened to her one-time love. The novel covers much ground, geographically and historically, but never fully pulls together its disparate story elements. Still, there are enough secrets, lies, and betrayals to keep the reader turning the pages. (Jan.)
The Gimmicks is a gorgeous epic that astounds with its scope and beauty. With empathy and humor, McCormick unravels the ties between brotherhood and betrayal, love and abandonment, and the fictions we create to live with the pain of the past. This novel will blow you away.” — Brit Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers.
“Chris McCormick's The Gimmicks knocked me back and then knocked me over. A fascinating and bold debut novel that more than answers the promise of his terrific first collection of stories, Desert Boys. A wide-ranging, globe — Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others
“Chris McCormick is a novelist of uncommon vision, empathy, and purpose. The Gimmicks crosses continents and decades to tell a remarkable story of historical trauma, friendship, and the moral combat of professional wrestling. Though haunted by ghosts, The Gimmicks is brilliantly, boisterously alive." — Anthony Marra, author of NBCC John Leonard Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“[The Gimmicks’s] subcultures, emphasized in the book’s eye-catching cover design and promotional copy, are not what fuel it. It’s really about history — personal and collective — and it’s rooted in horrors from more than a century ago that are still making news today… At a time when plot and contrivance in literary fiction are not the most fashionable things, McCormick, in his early 30s, proves adept at old-fashioned skills that one hopes will never go entirely unpracticed.” — New York Times
“This brilliant, kooky book touches on everything from the Armenian genocide and the arcane rules of backgammon to the spandexed underworld of semiprofessional wrestling in 1980s Los Angeles…Hardly a page will go by that you won’t marvel at McCormick’s tender, surreally comic study of two brothers…It’s all stranger than fiction, and too fantastic not to wish it were true.” — Entertainment Weekly
"McCormick explores the plight of Armenian refugees who arrive in America with their bodies as their only commodity and how a national trauma shapes Armenian identity. Masterfully structured and stupendously ambitious, this sweeping historical epic bears comparison to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Always moving, brilliantly realized, and full of wondrous humor, this is a debut of rare depth and brilliance." — Booklist (starred review)
"A fluid, beautifully written story about professional wrestling, intergenerational trauma, genocide, and history, jumping through Armenia to America and from one generation to another." — The Millions
Chris McCormick's The Gimmicks knocked me back and then knocked me over. A fascinating and bold debut novel that more than answers the promise of his terrific first collection of stories, Desert Boys. A wide-ranging, globe
The Gimmicks is a gorgeous epic that astounds with its scope and beauty. With empathy and humor, McCormick unravels the ties between brotherhood and betrayal, love and abandonment, and the fictions we create to live with the pain of the past. This novel will blow you away.
[The Gimmicks’s] subcultures, emphasized in the book’s eye-catching cover design and promotional copy, are not what fuel it. It’s really about history — personal and collective — and it’s rooted in horrors from more than a century ago that are still making news today… At a time when plot and contrivance in literary fiction are not the most fashionable things, McCormick, in his early 30s, proves adept at old-fashioned skills that one hopes will never go entirely unpracticed.
"A fluid, beautifully written story about professional wrestling, intergenerational trauma, genocide, and history, jumping through Armenia to America and from one generation to another."
"McCormick explores the plight of Armenian refugees who arrive in America with their bodies as their only commodity and how a national trauma shapes Armenian identity. Masterfully structured and stupendously ambitious, this sweeping historical epic bears comparison to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Always moving, brilliantly realized, and full of wondrous humor, this is a debut of rare depth and brilliance."
This brilliant, kooky book touches on everything from the Armenian genocide and the arcane rules of backgammon to the spandexed underworld of semiprofessional wrestling in 1980s Los Angeles…Hardly a page will go by that you won’t marvel at McCormick’s tender, surreally comic study of two brothers…It’s all stranger than fiction, and too fantastic not to wish it were true.
Chris McCormick is a novelist of uncommon vision, empathy, and purpose. The Gimmicks crosses continents and decades to tell a remarkable story of historical trauma, friendship, and the moral combat of professional wrestling. Though haunted by ghosts, The Gimmicks is brilliantly, boisterously alive."
Will Watt and Mike Ortego provide the main narration of this novel about the multigenerational impact of the Armenian Genocide. The story blends the worlds of wrestling and backgammon with scenes of political intrigue and violence. Both narrators do not overemphasize the most devastating moments, focusing listeners' attention upon the effects of historical events on the course of everyday lives. Watt illuminates the tensions that arise from cousins Avo and Ruben's participation in Armenian causes. Ortego adeptly captures former wrestler Terry's canny but thoughtful tone as he reflects on managing Avo's wrestling career in the U.S. and on the loss of his younger brother. Mary Jane Wells reveals Avo's former girlfriend, Mina's unease with Ruben in the only chapter she narrates. M.J. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
2019-10-14
Two cousins emigrate from Armenia, finding their destinies in backgammon and pro wrestling.
You needn't be well schooled in either sport to appreciate the debut novel by McCormick (Desert Boys: Stories, 2016); both serve mainly as metaphors for the mix of smarts, luck, and fakery that are essential to every immigrant survival story. In the early 1970s, cousins Ruben and Avo were as close as brothers in a rural Armenian town that promises nothing but endless reprosecutions of the country's genocidal past. One escape hatch is competitive backgammon, and the game has a prodigy in Mina, a young woman who earns a spot in a tournament in Paris. If Avo knocks down her teacher, killing him, was it an accident, or was Avo angling for a seat on the flight? Regardless, Ruben finds his way to France while Avo heads to California; both become involved in secret terrorist plots against Armenia's Turkish aggressors. A falling-out with those terrorists gets Avo a scar on his forehead and a gig in pro wrestling, where he's known as the Brow Beater. The busy plotting (Avo's former manager narrates chapters that move the story into the late 1980s) makes the novel a bit sodden, and anybody looking for lively depictions of wrestling bouts will be disappointed. McCormick is more focused on pro wrestling's notion of kayfabe, of keeping up appearances to advance a narrative, a sustained theme in Ruben's and Avo's lives outside of Armenia. On that front, he fully inhabits the cousins' lives with passion and Slavic dark humor. The truth, McCormick writes "is the only thing that can pin a heart open or seal it off forever." The pathos of this story comes from the struggle of its protagonists to do either.
A busy but well-constructed tale about new lands and the ghosts of an old one.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940172923883 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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