The Constant Heart

Starred review from August 6, 2012
Nova’s latest effort is an evocative family yarn that follows a father and son at odds with each other’s morality and a wild-card woman pulling the strings. Jake, the novel’s capable 17-year-old narrator, is the son of mismatched parents, a New Age–obsessed mother and a faithless father, a wildlife biologist who spends his nights on the couch turning a blind eye to his wife’s infidelity. Life for Jake in rural northeastern New York becomes spiced with the brash, hard-knock life lessons taught by brazen outsider Sara McGill, the target of his unrequited crush. When a misguided attempt to deal drugs in a women’s prison is botched, Sara is arrested and the story fast forwards to find Jake as an astronomy teacher who is reunited with the devilish Sara when they both happen upon a Radio Shack that is being robbed, followed by a days-long, defining group fishing trip where crushing secrets and murderous intentions bubble to the surface. Nova (The Book of Dreams) has again produced expertly drawn characters and carefully measured, suspenseful prose with some surprises, all with undertones orbiting around Einstein’s cosmological constant theory of relativity. But it’s bad girl Sara who steals the show by sweeping everyone into her swirling cyclone of lethal predicaments while coquettishly insisting she “didn’t bring the plague to your house.” Agent: The Hendra Agency.

August 1, 2012

"Men are dogs--Maureen Dowd." This epigraph greets readers at the beginning of Nova's meditative, philosophical, and beautifully realized new novel about the nature of embattled American manhood. Nova (The Good Son; Tornado Alley) has built the novel around two very decent men--a father and his adult son, Jake--who share a deep emotional bond forged after Jake's mother leaves the family when he is a young boy. Both Jake and his father are deeply sympathetic characters, and Nova celebrates perhaps most fundamentally here the compassionate and honorable way they treat the women in their lives. Jake grows up to become a physicist, and discussions of Einstein's theory of relativity are interspersed throughout the novel, providing a fascinating thematic element related to the search for something constant in a world defined by change and instability. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the only constant available to us is "the constant heart" embodied by these two men. VERDICT This is a novel of deep maturity and thoughtfulness. Recommended for fans of serious literary fiction.--Patrick M. Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2012
From Nova (The Informer, 2010, etc.), another illustration, painted in noirish tints, that love is all we need. Jason Brady is the hero, father of the protagonist, Jake. Jake is an astronomer, and the constant of the title refers to both his father's virtue and to the Constant, a component of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The book is set in upstate New York, in a small city devolving into a generic suburb of all-night pharmacies, auto parts stores and mini malls. Jake is in love with Sara, a cynic from a broken home. Together, they stare into space at pictures beamed back from the Hubble telescope. When cracks appear in Jake's home, his father is a rock, doing right even by those who wrong him. Jake escapes into academics. Sara, afflicted, falls into trouble. Returning to live near his father, Jake becomes reacquainted with Sara in an encounter of cable-ready cinematic mayhem--an absurd, even laughable moment. But the book gains momentum, as if Nova has come back to the monochrome country where he is most comfortable. Sara is in the thick of what rhymes with it, and she draws the two men out of their comfort zones and into her eccentric orbit. The exquisite, excruciating climax pits Sara's boorish pursuers against the Brady patriarch's implacable virtue. If the rest of the book were half as gripping as this adventure in the noir wilderness, it might be considered a classic. But the taut moments only make the execrable and the platitudinous more so. Wildly uneven, by turns cringe-worthy and hilarious, this is an uneventful trip to a worthy destination.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2012
After writing nearly a dozen character-piloted novels with noirish undertones (e.g., Cruisers, 2004) and one thriller (The Informer, 2010), Nova cycles back to the inspiration for his memoir, Brook Trout and the Writing Life (1999; expanded edition, 2011), in this taut and relentless tale of fly-fishing, family crises, and crime. Jake, an astronomer fascinated by Einstein, has always been happiest fishing in the Adirondack wilderness with his wildlife-biologist father, Jason. Now, at a crucial juncture, he flashes back to his teenage self and his foundational ardor for nebulae and astrophysics and audacious, wounded, and elusive Sara. Her mother murdered her father. Jake's mother commits lesser crimes against her family, strengthening the love between wise Jason and cosmic-minded Jake. Years later, their father-son bond is put to the ultimate test when Sara reappears and drags them into her surprising and barbaric underworld. Nova's over-the-top, if psychologically intriguing, and richly metaphorical plot is irradiated by rhapsodic visions of celestial forces and earthy glory and trouble. A heart-jolting yet solicitous tale fueled by Nova's passionate reminder that not all men are brutes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)