Little Disasters

March 5, 2018
Klein’s sharply observant debut follows two young couples in hipster Brooklyn through a year of changes. Part of the novel takes place on a steamy summer day in 2010, the rest of it in the year leading up to that day. On July 19, a mysterious accident has shut down the subway system and closed off much of midtown Manhattan. Michael, an artist and furniture maker and Paul, an actor and paralegal, attempt to get back to Brooklyn to meet the woman they both love, Jenny, an aspiring novelist and Paul’s wife. Michael’s wife, Rebecca, a cookie entrepreneur, waits at home with their one-year-old son. The novel, told from the alternating points of view of Michael and Paul, plays the evolution of the affair between Michael and Jenny against the physical challenges the men face on their odysseys home. Klein is at his best making notes on the nuances of behavior in this particular tribe of Brooklynites advancing warily into maturity, and in tracking unsentimentally the progress
of an affair. He loses his way when he ventures into high drama, as when he gives Jenny and Paul a baby who dies immediately after being born, or thrusts Paul into hero mode in a journey through a subway tunnel. These unfortunate operatic moments aside, Klein pulls off a well-composed chamber piece in which all four principal characters are treated with respect.

March 15, 2018
An extramarital affair in Brooklyn culminates on the day of an ominous subway shutdown in this debut novel.A year ago, Paul and Jenny and Michael and Rebecca--couples as-yet-unconnected--go to the same hospital in Brooklyn for scheduled pregnancy inductions. Though it's 2009, both women insist on laboring alone, leaving both men in the waiting room to stew. This is the first bit of uncanny coincidence and the setting of the first not-so-little disaster: Paul and Jenny's son dies shortly after his birth. A month later, Paul bizarrely decides to contract Michael, a carpenter, to turn their nursery into an office for Jenny. He also invites Michael and Rebecca to dinner, which, unsurprisingly, is a disaster. Maybe a little one, but it lays the groundwork for a grim affair. Michael, a cynical native New Yorker, witty and brimming with self-satisfaction, is drawn to the dark and clever Jenny. While he claims over and over to love his wife and new son (both ciphers, the wife so perfectly good that she bakes cookies for a living), he dives into the affair relentlessly. A year later, when the book begins, Michael is in the northernmost tip of Manhattan, waiting to start a new life with Jenny, who stands him up. Paul is on the subway under the river, hopeful that Jenny will keep her promise to stay with him, when the trains stop running. The complex novel tracks both of the men's arduous journeys back to Jenny with gritty, sweaty specificity while they wonder what kind of giant disaster stranded them. Interposed are chapters from each of their viewpoints leading up to the present. Paul, a seeming milquetoast, hides some interesting, small perversions. Perhaps this explains his desire to be friends with strangers who have what he tragically does not, but the book is a bit tone-deaf on parenting and loss.A twisted love letter to New York City.

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April 1, 2018

On the hottest day of the year, smoke rises from midtown Manhattan in the wake of a mysterious disaster. Without public transit, electricity, or cell phone service, Michael Gould and Paul Fenniger each attempt to make their way home to Brooklyn and the woman they both love. Michael and Paul met one year before in the waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital on the night their wives gave birth. Michael and Rebecca left the next morning with an infant son; Paul and Jennifer did not. In the aftermath of their loss, Paul engages Michael's carpentry services to transform the unused nursery into a home office for Jenny. The two couples develop a tentative friendship even as Michael and Jenny initiate an affair that promises to destroy both marriages. In Michael, first-time novelist Klein has realized a deeply unlikable, slyly funny protagonist who feels fully three-dimensional. The other characters, especially the women, are obscured under the veneer of Michael's interpretation, yet it works for the story. Using alternating first-person narration and an oscillating time line, the author ratchets up the tension and cleverly exposes the gap between reality and perception. VERDICT Readers of literary fiction will be intrigued.--Lindsay Morton, P.L. of Science, San Francisco

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2018
In 2010, the present of book editor Klein's New York-set first novel, a disaster has just happened somewhere around Midtown. Michael, married to Becky, is waiting at the Cloisters for Jenny, with whom he's having an affair, when she texts to say she can't make it. He heads back to Brooklyn from Manhattan's northernmost tip to rectify the situation when he learns that trains and traffic are stopped, and he won't be getting anywhere unless it's on foot. Meanwhile, Jenny's husband Paul's train stops below the East River and all passengers must evacuate. Alternating between Michael and Paul's perspectives and journeys toward Brooklyn (with Michael voicing the lion's share of the novel), the story jumps back to a year prior, when the two couples fatefully met. Constant movement between time-stamped sections and Michael and Jenny's affair, exciting and somehow uncomplicated, propels readers through the upsets, in and outside of these relationships, of the past year. This very well-groomed, domestic drama, with strongly developed and realistically voiced male characters, marks an auspicious debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)