Bill Roorbach’s new novel, “Life Among Giants,” is a bighearted, big-boned story about a young man’s entanglement with celebrities. Without a hint of satire, it offers a savvy reflection on America’s conflicted relationship to fame: beguiled one minute, horrified the next; desperate to touch the Beautiful People, but just as eager to rebuke them. The novel’s 6-foot-8 narrator, David Hochmeyer, reminds me of that star-struck neighbor who once fell under Gatsby’s spell and felt “simultaneously enchanted and repelled.”
In fact, the opening pages of “Life Among Giants” make a nod to Fitzgerald’s classic: Across the water from David’s modest home sits “a mansion the size of an embassy” that draws everyone’s attention and sparks fantasies of impossible romance. Full of vast ballrooms, secret passages and luxurious bedrooms, it’s like something Steven Millhauser might have designed for Paris Hilton. The woman who lives there — Sylphide — is “the greatest ballerina in the history of the world,” and she twirls through David’s life for 40 years.
(Algonquin) - In a novel transfixed by celebrity, billionaires, best-selling authors, world-ranked tennis players, Super Bowl veterans, epoch-making choreographers and trend-setting foodies thunder through the pages.
True to his title, Roorbach has created a story populated with giants. Superlatives grow so thick in these pages that there’s barely room for an ordinary person to turn around. In addition to the world-famous Sylphide, there’s her husband, a Bono-like rock star whose melodies and images have seeped into our cultural DNA. Billionaires, best-selling authors, world-ranked tennis players, Super Bowl veterans, epoch-making choreographers and trend-setting foodies thunder through these pages.
But not everyone can gain admittance to this Olympian realm, and that frustration is what kicks off “Life Among Giants.” David’s glad-handing father is a struggling financier in Westport, Conn., “always finding ways to make himself taller,” always just one shady deal away from the good life. For this intoxicated dreamer, the mansion across the pond is a flame he can’t resist. Depressed and desperate beneath a shiny veneer of overconfidence, David’s father falls in with some very tough men, and in the early pages of the novel, they murder him in a fancy restaurant. That bloody assassination leaves a mysterious connection to Sylphide that will mystify David for decades to come.
“Life Among Giants” reads like something written by a kinder, gentler John Irving. There’s no bear, but David is a familiar Irving character: the extraordinary but modest young man, fatherless, involved with an older woman, drifting through the lives of strange people, pining for love, tender toward sexual outliers. There’s even the requisite paternal mystery that simmers a little too long.
Roorbach takes his time, following his endearing narrator from high school to middle age, repeatedly folding his story back on itself like an origami master. That opening hail of bullets is still ringing in our ears when David returns to the months leading up to his father’s murder. We watch his sister babysitting for the famous rocker and his ballerina wife. David nervously falls in love with Sylphide, while his father tries to ingratiate himself with the famous couple across the water.
This commenter is a Washington Post contributor. Post contributors aren’t staff, but may write articles or columns. In some cases, contributors are sources or experts quoted in a story.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.
Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.
Loading...
Comments