The Gargoyle Hunters
A Novel
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
January 16, 2017
Gill, who has written extensively about New York City’s architectural gems, makes his fiction debut with a coming-of-age tale about preservation and its discontents. The result is flawed but intriguing, a structure whose outward charm conceals some hidden cracks. In the late 1970s, the young narrator, Griffin, lives in an Upper East Side row house with his sister, bohemian mother, and the steady stream of down-on-their-heels boarders she takes in. Living downtown, his mercurial father restores antique architectural decorations, often pilfered from one of the many buildings slated to be torn down by “brutally efficient” demolition contractors as the city continues to “cannibaliz itself.” Dad enlists the nimble, eager-to-please Griffin in his thieving efforts, which involve prying gargoyles perched on Manhattan’s historic buildings, then a more ambitious effort: to “steal a building.” The portrait of Griffin’s father has some nice touches—he is the kind of man who takes his baby out for a midnight walk and returns with a terra-cotta bust strapped onto the carriage—but he comes across less as a rounded character than an eccentric tour guide holding forth on ornamental features, lambasting philistine developers, or speechifying: “The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning—a patina of memory and grime and experience.” Griffin himself is a winning narrator striving to map his place within urban and familial landscapes in a bewildering state of flux.
John Gill's decision to perform his own novel for audio is just right. His performance isn't polished, but it's lively and effective, and it deepens the conceit of the story, in which the narrator, Griffin, describes his boyhood with his parents, his mother, bohemian and feckless, and his absent father, obsessed with rescuing (liberating) the architectural ornaments of a vanishing New York. Griffin is a wholly believable and charming character coming of age in Manhattan in the '70's. Gill's knowledge of built New York is granular, and for anyone who cares about the architectural heritage of American cities, and especially of New York, this book is a feast; it succeeds as often-hilarious bildungsroman, as adventure story, and as deliciously accurate and specific urban history. B.G. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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