L. I. E.

July 31, 2000
Dissolution, love and sexual frustration are the driving themes of this debut novel, set on blue-collar Long Island, or "Wrong Island," as its denizens here refer to it. Spanning the last two years of the '80s amid several dead-end towns in Suffolk County, the novel disjointedly follows the painful maturation of Harlan Kessler, a long-haired, guitar-picking 18-year-old who's searching for his life's direction but would settle for losing his virginity. A hilarious opening sequence sets the stage for his fragmented, slapstick journey: the moment before Harlan rids himself of his innocence, his entire family walks in on the teen couple en flagrante. The plot expands to include Harlan's scary brothers and adulterous parents, his loser friends and their dysfunctional families. Harlan's pal, drummer Todd Slatsky, has wild parties at which he plays home movies featuring his father beating up his mother. Harlan's eventual romantic interest, Sarah, is terrified of her mother's new husband, a sleazy coke dealer who supplies the drugs that fuel the mental breakdown of Harlan's friend Beedy. Harlan is the center of this series of increasingly odd episodes, which progress from the depressingly plausible sexual bunglings to scenes of death, destruction and depravity. In an utterly bizarre one-act play set in the middle of the book, the fragmentation of Harlan's brain mirrors the disintegration of his family. The story of Harlan's sad life is rife with the wry asides, ironic italics and narrative tricks much better left to the skills of Dave Eggers, and the novel's conclusion is deeply, unsatisfyingly ambiguous. Hollander's debut is set against a backdrop so bleak that it undermines his otherwise formidable talent for tragic irony and cinematic vision.

August 9, 2000
A male coming-of-age novel isn't all that rare, but we don't often find one that presents its main character's growing maturity with such insight and sensitivity. At the onset, protagonist Harlan Kessler is in high school on Long Island in the 1980s (the eponymous L.I.E. stands for Long Island Expressway), where his concerns are limited to sports and losing his virginity. In the early chapters, Hollander makes liberal use of italics to demonstrate youthful exuberance, but his narrative voice quickly sobers as Harlan stumbles his way into adulthood. Harlan's middle-class Long Island is an American dream gone wrong--an endless sprawl of bedroom communities populated with disconnected people. Harlan sees his friends scatter or get caught up in drugs, suicide, or dead-end jobs. Meanwhile, he pins his hopes on a rock guitarist career, a choice destined to keep him stuck in his job as an IRS clerk. Hollander experiments with some stylistic tricks and in the end waxes surrealistic, but the novel's true strength is its realistic depiction of hollow, suburban life. Highly recommended for first-novel collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/00.]--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2000
For some, the Long Island Expressway, the ribbon of highway dubbed L.I.E. by those who live in proximity to it, is a road of possibilities--an escape from stifling suburbia that connects to the wider world. For Harlan Kessler, though, it's more like a noose around his neck. Bereft of the safety net of high school and estranged from his dysfunctional family, Harlan goes from party to party, playing in a band, hanging out with his equally directionless friends, lost in a "post-pubescent identity crisis," with no job, no girl, and, as he frequently moans, "no sex." In blackly humorous episodes as disjointed as Harlan's thoughts and childish longings, Hollander writes compellingly of alienated teens (and screwed-up adults) in the late 1980s, painting a bleak yet affecting portrait of people who struggle to be more than onlookers in life and who, ever so rarely, win the battle. ((Reviewed August 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)