The Listeners

March 5, 2012
Zumas’s debut novel comes at the reader in over a hundred self-contained, lucid pieces: a visit to a doctor in which Quinn, the teenage narrator, is ominously evasive about her weight loss; siblings bantering around the dinner table in a free fall of time; a dream of octopi, creatures that become a motif, much like John Irving’s bear. Even happy memories have a melancholy undertone because Quinn is grieving the death of her sister, who is also revealed in fragments (“She became a woman three months before she died”). Of siblings Fod, Mert, and Riley, Riley is the most three-dimensional and the closest to Quinn. Zumas’s tone is crisply naturalistic, slightly off center, and downright surreal, sometimes all at once, though often starting as one and drifting into another. The novel’s tantalizing form approximates Quinn’s mental and emotional state; she isn’t in the traditional fog of grief, she’s hyper-observant and arch: “The pong of cheap meat and fry oil hung on the air,” and “From the subway I climbed to a street ateem with suited normals and walking-homers....” For all this, plot threads are mostly explicable, creating a compelling build-it-yourself tapestry of cherished memories and open wounds.

April 15, 2012
Zumas' debut novel reads a bit like Faulkner. Fractured imagery, shifts in time and place, and a motley crew of charactersFod, Quinn, Geck, and Cam, to name a fewlead the reader through a patchwork map of the marred childhood and failed adulthood of Quinn, a thirtysomething washed-up musician with a drinking problem. A former anorexic and adolescent cutter, Quinn is smart, witty, and filled with obsession and anxiety over the events of her sister's death and its aftermath. Zumas plays with narrative conventions here, peppering the text with short chapters that are at times ethereal and disjointed but often tinged with humor. Readers looking for gritty experimental fiction in the manner of the late Gilbert Sorrentino will find The Listeners whetting their appetites for more from this promising new author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)