The Astral

Starred review from April 11, 2011
Like the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn of its setting, Christensen's unremittingly wonderful latest (after Trouble) is populated by an odd but captivating mix of characters. At the center is Harry Quirk, a middle-aged poet whose comfortable life is upended one winter day when his wife, Luz, convinced he's having an affair, destroys his notebooks, throws his laptop from the window, and kicks him out. Things, Harry has to admit, are not going well: their idealistic Dumpster-diving daughter, Karina, is lonely and lovelorn, and their son, Hector, is in the grip of a messianic cult. Taking in a much-changed Greenpoint, Brooklyn, while working at a lumberyard and hoping to recover his poetic spark, Harry must come to terms with the demands of starting anew at 57. Astute and unsentimental, at once romantic and wholly rational, Harry is an everyman adrift in a changing world, and as he surveys his failings, Christensen takes a singular, genuine story and blows it up into a smart inquiry into the nature of love and the commitments we make, the promises we do and do not honor, and the people we become as we negotiate the treacherous parameters of marriage and friendship and parenthood.

Starred review from May 15, 2011

Christensen (Trouble, 2009, etc.) knows her way around aging characters. Having won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her lively septuagenarians in The 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's The Horses Mouth transported from 1930s London to present-day Brooklyn.

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January 1, 2011

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.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2011
The latest by Christensen (The Great Man, 2007) introduces wordy poet-narrator Harry Quirk as a man on the brink of losing his wife, Luz, who kicked him out and destroyed every trace of his latest manuscript, and thusly his entire life in the Astral, the giant old memory-cavern of a building in Brooklyn where theyve spent their lives together. Luz, wrongly convinced Harrys been sleeping with his female best friend, is irate and implacable despite Harrys earnest attempts to prove his innocence and continued love for her. Homeless, jobless, and disbelieved by most everyone, Harry begins to take charge of his life in a way he clearly never had to before, getting a crummy job and committing to, with his daughter, rescuing his son from the apparent cult hes joined. A developed cast of characters, not the least of which is Brooklyn itself, populates the narrative, and it comes as somewhat of a relief when Harry realizes hes become unspeakably, pun intended, bored by the sound and sight of my own poetic voice. A satisfying redoing of a man undone.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)