Life Among Giants: A Novel

The New York Times Book Review - Haley Tanner

…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 Washington Post

…Life Among Giants, is a bighearted, big-boned story about a young man's entanglement with celebrities. Without a hint of satire, it offers a savvy reflection on America's conflicted relationship to fame: beguiled one minute, horrified the next; desperate to touch the Beautiful People, but just as eager to rebuke them…Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.
—Ron Charles

Publishers Weekly

An exploration of lives touched by greatness and tragedy in equal measure, Roorbach’s latest novel traces towering Princeton graduate and NFL player–cum– restaurateur David “Lizard” Hochmeyer in his attempt to unravel the tangled conspiracy behind his parents’ murder in 1970. When his parents are killed in front of him at a restaurant, David believes the culprits are connected to his neighbor, the elegant ballerina Sylphide, whose rock star husband also died under mysterious circumstances, and with whom David has fallen heedlessly in love. As David trades a career in football for one in food, his sister, Kate, a tennis star with “tough girl” endorsements, slides into paranoia over their parents’ deaths. It is a soapy and thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts, a sensory abundance that fails to mitigate the sorrows of David’s youth. This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity; David and Sylphide inhabit a galaxy of stars, each more blinding and destructive than the next, drawing intrigue and violence into their orbits. Roorbach (Big Bend) has written a mystery free of contemporary cynicism and recalling the glitter and allure of a kind of stardom that has also, in its way, been collateral damage to a greedy financial machine. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Nov.)

Review

Editors’ Pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012 list

Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012

Columbus Dispatch’s Top Books of 2012

“Consistently surprising and truly entertaining . . . Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting.”—The Boston Globe

“A bighearted, big-boned story . . . Life Among Giants reads like something written by a kinder, gentler John Irving . . . Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.”—The Washington Post

“I hereby nominate Lizard the humongous football player and Sylphide the mysterious ballerina as two of my favorite characters of 2012 . . . Roorbach has crafted a story that's rollicking and sexy but not shallow or slight. Seven-foot Lizard and petite Sylphide, both giants in their own way, are a pair to behold. Part Gatsby, part Garp, Life Among Giants is an urgent tale of greed, love, and revenge.”—Neal Thompson for Amazon.com (Best Books of the Month Spotlight Selection)

“[Lizard’s and his sister’s] fascinating journey highlights the importance of steering your own fate, and it left me pondering where my own life will lead.”—Real Simple (reader’s review)

“[An] eventful, elegiac novel of sports and murder, food and finance.”—Bloomberg News

“What lingers after finishing Life Among Giants is the beauty of Roorbach’s appreciation of his characters’ exceptional physical abilities, as they play football, cook, make love and dance.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Complexly plotted, wildly entertaining, and hugely funny.”—Orion Magazine

“Besides being a compelling mystery, the kind to keep one reading well after bedtime, and a novel that almost insists on being immediately reread, Life Among Giants is a reminder of the ways we all shape our lives into stories, and the ways those stories, in turn, shape us.”—The Columbus Dispatch

“Life Among Giants is a long, strange trip, but an enthralling one.”—Wilmington Star-News

“This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main characters.”—Booklist

“This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot.”—Library Journal

“[A] thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts . . . This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity; David and Sylphide inhabit a galaxy of stars, each more blinding and destructive than the next, drawing intrigue and violence into their orbits.”—Publishers Weekly

“Great set-up, sparkling characters . . . A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Editors’ Pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012 list

Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012

Columbus Dispatch’s Top Books of 2012

“Consistently surprising and truly entertaining . . . Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting.”—The Boston Globe

“A bighearted, big-boned story . . . Life Among Giants reads like something written by a kinder, gentler John Irving . . . Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.”—The Washington Post

“I hereby nominate Lizard the humongous football player and Sylphide the mysterious ballerina as two of my favorite characters of 2012 . . . Roorbach has crafted a story that's rollicking and sexy but not shallow or slight. Seven-foot Lizard and petite Sylphide, both giants in their own way, are a pair to behold. Part Gatsby, part Garp, Life Among Giants is an urgent tale of greed, love, and revenge.”—Neal Thompson for Amazon.com (Best Books of the Month Spotlight Selection)

“[Lizard’s and his sister’s] fascinating journey highlights the importance of steering your own fate, and it left me pondering where my own life will lead.”—Real Simple (reader’s review)

“[An] eventful, elegiac novel of sports and murder, food and finance.”—Bloomberg News

“What lingers after finishing Life Among Giants is the beauty of Roorbach’s appreciation of his characters’ exceptional physical abilities, as they play football, cook, make love and dance.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Complexly plotted, wildly entertaining, and hugely funny.”—Orion Magazine

“Besides being a compelling mystery, the kind to keep one reading well after bedtime, and a novel that almost insists on being immediately reread, Life Among Giants is a reminder of the ways we all shape our lives into stories, and the ways those stories, in turn, shape us.”—The Columbus Dispatch

“Life Among Giants is a long, strange trip, but an enthralling one.”—Wilmington Star-News

“This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main characters.”—Booklist

“This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot.”—Library Journal

“[A] thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts . . . This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity; David and Sylphide inhabit a galaxy of stars, each more blinding and destructive than the next, drawing intrigue and violence into their orbits.”—Publishers Weekly

“Great set-up, sparkling characters . . . A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.”—Kirkus Reviews

Library Journal

This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone—steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot. The narrator, David (Lizard) Hockmeyer, is a giant himself, a former high school football player who's almost seven feet tall. His parents were shot in front of him when he was a teen, and he and his troubled, bipolar sister Kate have been obsessed for decades with finding the killers. Lizard and Kate live in Connecticut near a celebrated Swedish ballerina who calls herself Sylphide after the classic ballet and is the widow of Dabney, a flamboyant British rocker who died in a car crash. (Improbably, Dabney is already a big star in America in the early 1960s, before the Beatles and the British invasion.) In the end, Lizard and Sylphide's lives intersect in more ways than either of them could have imagined. VERDICT This big, sprawling novel has so much going on that it's easy to lose track of the murder mystery at its heart. It would pack more of a punch if it had a sharper focus.—Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Library Journal

David "Lizard" Hochmeyer is a star quarterback set on Princeton until the mysterious murder of his parents. As he and sister Kate struggle to cope, they find their lives crossing with prima ballerina Sylphide and her rock star husband, who inhabit the mansion across the pond from their Connecticut home. In-house enthusiasm, big publicity, and a 12-city tour.

Kirkus Reviews

With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's (Temple Stream, 2005, etc.) latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow. Sylphide's husband was Dabney Stryker-Stewart, an internationally famous rock star knighted for his work with children trapped in war. Add Kate, Lizard's talented tennis-playing sister; her lover and professor, Jack Cross, a famed pop-psychologist teaching at Yale; and Don Shula, legendary Miami Dolphins coach. Next come Etienne, chef extraordinaire, tattooed head to toe, and RuAngela, Etienne's five o'clock--shadowed transvestite lover. That's a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book. Lizard's father, always skating the edge of respectability and propriety, is a foot soldier in a Wall Street Gecko-type financial shell game. Lizard's mother, married beneath her station, drinks martinis and plays country-club tennis, her talent as a tournament ringer for the moneyed set assuring the family access to the right circles. The family resides next door to High Side, palatial home of Sylphide and Dabney, where teenage Kate was caretaker for Dabney's son and became Dabney's lover. Then Nick, Lizard's father, turned state's evidence and was shot dead, along with his wife, for his trouble. Great setup, sparkling characters, but one-third into the book readers will hunger for less setup and characterization and want the story to get moving. It does, in complex fashion. Kate goes bonkers after her parents' murders. Emily and Sylphide jump in and out of Lizard's bed and his charmed life--he's a backup quarterback for the Dolphins, owner of two successful, trendy restaurants--before things take a turn. Roorbach knows food; readers will want recipes of the fare he describes. The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.