Synopsis
In a funny, poignant, wonderfully original debut novel, the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Trouble with Girls weaves a beguiling tale of fathers and sons, sons and lovers…and one unforgettable summer in a young man’s life–somewhere between a past he doesn’t understand and a future he’s not ready to live….
ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA
For thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman, life in Atlanta in the year 1996–the summer of the Olympics–doesn’t feel half bad. Writing reviews of basement rock bands for an alternative paper, Gerald has carefully avoided getting a real job, while watching his old friends from grad school start careers, marriages, and affairs–often with each other. But in this one life-changing summer, something is about to happen that will shake Gerald out of his complacency forever.
Gerald’s father, his brilliant, vagabond, and utterly unhelpful father, wants to come and stay with him “for a while.” Ever since childhood, Gerald has tried to bury his relationship with his father under a life of carefully crafted wrong turns. And now Paul Brinkman has shown up with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis, and an unbearable confession to make. But Gerald knows one thing for sure: He doesn’t want to hear it. Try as he might to stop it, the future is bearing down on him. A job is being dangled in New York. A secret from his past is waiting to be revealed. An ex-girlfriend is suddenly sending mixed signals. And in one moment in one summer in the city of Atlanta, everything is about to change forever. When it does, Gerald is going to have a whole new vision ofwho he is, who his father and friends are, and what he must do next.
An exhilarating and touching novel about family and flirtations, growing up and letting go, Alternative Atlanta brilliantly captures a time of life when everything seems possible and impossible at the same time. It is a work of dazzling storytelling from a writer of immense gifts.
Kirkus Reviews
A quick, amusing debut novel about the traumas of turning 30; dealing with a meddling parent; and navigating a social world comprised entirely of perma-exes and their new loves. Boswell (stories: Trouble with Girls, 2003) sets the whole in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. Gerald Brinkman, a pot-smoking, grad-school dropout who works as a rock critic for the local alternative weekly, is a man on the brink of making big decisions about life, love, work, and his gratuitously tangled family past. At a wedding for his ex-girlfriend Nora, Gerald bumps into his crush, Sasha, a "simian-eyed, Bombay-born drug rep" who is married to Aaron, a philandering surgeon and grown-up jock boy, who also happens to be another ex-boyfriend of Nora's. And that evening, Gerald picks up his troublesome father, a potbellied, Harvard-educated, T-shirt- and tennis shoe-wearing manic intellectual who may be even more bumbling and confused than Gerald himself. Dad, who has sold the family homestead and seems intent on moving into his son's studio apartment while "fixing" his computer and tagging along to rock concerts, is fairly bursting with scary family secrets about the death of Gerald's mother and his own poor health. Meanwhile, the family of exes are playing a furious game of musical chairs with sex, affection, and work: Dad and Gerald camp out at Nora's for awhile; Nora has some spectacular revelations about the possible father of her child; Nora's new husband becomes Gerald's new employer; Aaron continues to schtup the nurses, and Sasha follows Gerald to indie rock shows, bakes casseroles, and proffers wine and dinner invitations. Oh, and a Major New York Music Magazine wants him too. Gerald absorbs it allwith wry, intelligent commentary and few surprises. A charming, competent, and harmless addition to lad lit.