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Tall tales of mystery and entanglement, tenderly told
By Haley Tanner |
February 24, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AN enchanting, darkly mysterious ballerina. A dead rock star. An unsolved double homicide, decades old. A father felled by a shadowy past. An older sister as beautiful as she is mad. A gay vegetarian chef covered in tattoos. His transvestite lover. Secret passageways, nighttime trysts, affairs, embezzling, illicit recordings - all of it revolving around one 6-foot-8, humble, sincere, Ivy League-educated orphaned professional football player. Really, what more could you want?
As you might guess from its title if not from the list above, Bill Roorbach's second novel, "Life Among Giants," is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they're tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It's a dizzy romp. There's murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all.
The plot swirls around that mysterious double murder. As a high school student, David Hochmeyer - known as Lizard - witnesses the shooting of his parents. Until then his life has seemed normal, if blessed (Lizard is a star football player, recruited by Princeton), but of course things are not as they seem. Lizard's older sister, Kate, already at Yale and shacked up with a handsome professor, is traumatized by the murder, and descends into madness.
Across the street from the Hochmeyers' modest home is the "High Side," a palatial estate where the great ballerina Sylphide lived with her rock star husband, Dabney Stryker-Stewart, until his death. Nothing is unraveled without revealing another jumbled mystery, and Lizard discovers that the two households are more entwined than expected - and that their entanglement is both sexy and deadly. As I said, this is a romp.
Which isn't to say there isn't real meat here. Roorbach doesn't let the novel's rich entertainment stand in the way of emotional subtlety or homey, down-to-earth prose: "The dancer rose like heat from her chair, glided to me, extended long hands." The teenage Lizard is a real boy, struggling with how to grow up amid great loss. He is, at times, a bit of a marionette - the women in the book hold the strings - but he's no sap. He has integrity, but he's also a lonesome young man looking for love and companionship, and we're on his side throughout.
His sister's madness, meanwhile, isn't played for cheap drama or laughs. The entire novel seems to mourn the brilliant girl she could have been if she weren't so (understandably) obsessed with her parents' murder.
Roorbach seems to relish creating bold biographies for his characters, then getting the shading right - carefully applying depth and warmth and pathos and strange tenderness. These are not regular people, but they never feel like caricatures.
As you might guess from its title if not from the list above, Bill Roorbach's second novel, "Life Among Giants," is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they're tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It's a dizzy romp. There's murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all.
The plot swirls around that mysterious double murder. As a high school student, David Hochmeyer - known as Lizard - witnesses the shooting of his parents. Until then his life has seemed normal, if blessed (Lizard is a star football player, recruited by Princeton), but of course things are not as they seem. Lizard's older sister, Kate, already at Yale and shacked up with a handsome professor, is traumatized by the murder, and descends into madness.
Across the street from the Hochmeyers' modest home is the "High Side," a palatial estate where the great ballerina Sylphide lived with her rock star husband, Dabney Stryker-Stewart, until his death. Nothing is unraveled without revealing another jumbled mystery, and Lizard discovers that the two households are more entwined than expected - and that their entanglement is both sexy and deadly. As I said, this is a romp.
Which isn't to say there isn't real meat here. Roorbach doesn't let the novel's rich entertainment stand in the way of emotional subtlety or homey, down-to-earth prose: "The dancer rose like heat from her chair, glided to me, extended long hands." The teenage Lizard is a real boy, struggling with how to grow up amid great loss. He is, at times, a bit of a marionette - the women in the book hold the strings - but he's no sap. He has integrity, but he's also a lonesome young man looking for love and companionship, and we're on his side throughout.
His sister's madness, meanwhile, isn't played for cheap drama or laughs. The entire novel seems to mourn the brilliant girl she could have been if she weren't so (understandably) obsessed with her parents' murder.
Roorbach seems to relish creating bold biographies for his characters, then getting the shading right - carefully applying depth and warmth and pathos and strange tenderness. These are not regular people, but they never feel like caricatures.
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