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Overview
From the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man, a scintillating novel of love, loss, and literary rivalry set in rapidly changing Brooklyn.
The Astral is a huge rose-colored old pile of an apartment building in the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For decades it was the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, a nurse, and of their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry’s that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, and he’s been summarily kicked out. He now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps others) and find his way forward—and back into Luz’s good graces.
Harry Quirk is, in short, a loser, living small and low in the water. But touched by Kate Christensen’s novelistic grace and acute perception, his floundering attempts to reach higher ground and forge a new life for himself become funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men—and she turns them into literary art of the highest order.
Editorials
Ron Charles
…Christensen has…created a captivatingly believable male narrator…creating a voice so rich with the peculiar timbre of lived experience that you feel as though she's introduced you to a witty, deeply frustrated (and frustrating) new friend…a passionate, sexist, loving, complex man named Harry Quirk. Alive, like us. Go meet him.—The Washington Post
Library Journal
The Astral, a big, rose-hued apartment building in Brooklyn, NY, has long been home to poet Harry Quirk and his family. But Harry's wife, Luz, has discovered poems that seem to confirm her suspicions of infidelity, and she's tossed him out. Harry, sensing that he's failed as a poet, husband, and father (son Hector is trapped in a crazy Christian cult), decides to straighten out. This latest from Christensen arrives with some promise, as her recent The Great Man won a PEN Faulkner Award. This could be a real charmer; watch.Kirkus Reviews
Christensen (Trouble, 2009, etc.) knows her way around aging characters. Having won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her lively septuagenarians inThe Great Man (2007), she now creates a charmingly ribald bohemian poet flailing about in late middle age.
The title refers to the apartment building where Harry Quirk and his wife Luz, a devoutly Catholic Mexican nurse, have lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for all of their 30-year marriage. Now Luz has kicked Harry out and burnt his latest manuscript of poetry—eschewing popular trends, he writes in rhyme and meter—because she thinks his love poems are proof that he's been carrying on an affair with his friend Marion. Righteously claiming the poems are written to an imaginary woman, he fights hard to convince Luz of his fidelity and win her back. Meanwhile, he hangs out in his Greenpoint neighborhood, finds work at a Hasidic lumberyard where he's the only non-Jew, drinks at his local bars, visits Marion and discusses why they have never been and never will be lovers and moves from living space to living space until he ends up staying with his daughter Karina, a 25-year-old vegan dumpster-diving activist. He and Karina make visits to Karina's older brother Hector, always Luz's favorite, who has abandoned her Catholicism and joined a Christian cult led by a sexy charlatan who plans to marry Hector. While Harry wanders through his days, drinking, conversing, picking fights, trying to talk to Luz, who says she wants a divorce and won't see him, his Brooklyn world of aging bohemians comes vividly to life. There's not a lot of active plot here, but each minor character is a gem. As for Harry, by the time he faces the truth about his marriage and finds a measure of hard-earned happiness, or at least self-awareness, he has won the reader's heart. He's a larger-than-life, endearing fool.
A masterpiece of comedy and angst. Think Gulley Jimson of Joyce Cary'sThe Horses Mouthtransported from 1930s London to present-day Brooklyn.
The Barnes & Noble Review
With her lead character's name—Harry Quirk—Kate Christensen hands you a road map to her lovely, hilarious, and yeah, OK, quirky novel, The Astral. We meet Harry at age 57, just as his wife, Luz, has thrown him out for an affair it turns out he's not having. Harry's a poet, and Luz has decided that his latest manuscript is actually a series of love letters? Full review: With her lead character's name—Harry Quirk—Kate Christensen hands you a road map to her lovely, hilarious, and yeah, OK, quirky novel, The Astral. We meet Harry at age 57, just as his wife, Luz, has thrown him out for an affair it turns out he's not having. Harry's a poet, and Luz has decided that his latest manuscript is actually a series of love letters to their mutual friend of many years, Marion. Luz confronts Harry, ignores his protests, shreds his newest poems -- the only copies he has -- and sends him packing.
Harry leaves The Astral, the north Brooklyn apartment building he and Luz have occupied their entire married life, and moves to an SRO flophouse a few blocks away. Broke and brokenhearted, he's at loose ends. He flirts with a Polish girl at a donut shop, gets beat up by her boyfriend, fights back, and winds up in jail. He uses his one phone call to tell Marion, who bails him out and brings him home.
The beating and its aftermath are the start of a leisurely migration in an equally leisurely novel. Instead of bothering too much with plot, Christensen takes her time with The Astral. She mines Harry's smallest moments for illuminating backstory and revealing detail. Here's Harry, thinking about the charms and mysteries of Polish girls just seconds before having his nose broken.
Polish girls managed to ooze and withhold sex simultaneously. They dressed for Mass and the grocery store alike in slippery little cleavagey minidresses, sheer hose, and stilettos. They smelled of some pheromonal perfume only they seemed to have access to. Their bodies were at once soft and tight, breasty and rumpy but willow-waisted and slender-armed and long-legged, like some idealized dolls.That Harry has a gay daughter, Karina, a 25-year-old Freegan who eats and dresses and decorates with the world's castoffs, is both germane and incidental to the book. She takes her father into her home at a certain point in his wanderings, and, like Harry's, your respect and liking for her grows. Ditto for the fact that Harry lands a job, as an accountant, of all things, at a Hasidic lumber business. There's some trauma and drama and more than a few laughs, but none of it turns out to be the point.
And then there's Harry's son, Hector. He's a socially awkward boy who, at 27, has found his true purpose in a Christian cult on Long Island. The cult's members think Hector may be the Messiah. He's about to get engaged to the cult leader, a sexy Anthropologie-shopping sharpie at least twenty years his senior. Hector gives Harry and Karina someplace to go and something to do but, more important, he gives Christensen yet another landscape to explore, another cast of characters to parse.
Harry is presented as the bard in the book, but it's Christensen who lays claim to that territory. Unlike Harry, who sticks to (and is mired in) the sonnet's strict form, Christensen's verse is part and parcel of her prose. From the precision with which she dissects her characters' foibles to the Brooklyn landscapes she brings to vivid life, Christensen's meditation on marriage is viewed through a poet's eye, and tempered at times with a satirist's soul. —Veronique de Turenne
Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.