Roorbach spends the novel hopscotching between plausible and implausible. Periodically, a weird dreamlike quality wafts over these scenes, a reminder of the reality-distortion field that world-famous people exercise over everyonearound them.
It’s all endlessly entertaining, but endless, nonetheless. Originally, “Life Among Giants” was even longer, at 600 pages, but an editor prevailed on Roorbach to cut it down, and he should have kept prevailing. The tendency to cycle back on events already described taxes the novel’s pacing. Other sections of the book churn when they should drill down. While his increasingly unbalanced sister obsesses over their father’s death, David goes on to Princeton, where he’s a football star, which leads to a position on the Miami Dolphins, but the Ivy League campus never really materializes, and we get little visceral sense of the crunch and crash of a professional athlete’s life. This is big-time sports labeled, but not experienced. His affair with a masseuse therapist seems equally contrived (hours-long lovemaking sessions — sure). And the whole time, arcane clues to his father’s murder are polished over and over like coins that begin to lose their inscriptions.
(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.
When the story gets around to food, though, the plot grows tangible and pungent again. In the final sections, David opens a restaurant in his old home town. He’s borne back ceaselessly into the past, toward a solution to the crime that destroyed his family and toward the ballerina who dared to choreograph his life for “a dance too big for the stage.” After years of deception, subterfuge and outsize personalities, he’s a man who delights in the aroma and texture of real ingredients. “I lingered over the cooking,” he tells us, “rubbed out some sage leaves, rolled a little fresh thyme, taking too much of the other kind of time, two trips to the garden, inefficient pleasure, dry-panning the herbs with just a little more Thai fire-pepper than I thought I should.” (Roorbach recently served as a judge on Food Network’s “All Star Challenge”; what he knows about mushrooms alone could charm a gourmand — or take down an enemy. )
Asked once what he’d most like to change about the publishing industry, Roorbach wished for “many, many, many fewer books published.” That’s the kind of wisdom that can bring me to tears, but publishing infrequently doesn’t help an author’s marketability. Almost 60, Roorbach is one of those fine writers whose career is always just about ready to break out. While teaching at various colleges, he’s published several nonfiction books and placed nature essays and short stories in all the right places — Harper’s, the Atlantic, Granta — but his only previous novel appeared way back in 2001. Consequently, “Life Among Giants” strides out into a reading public largely unfamiliar with his name.
But I hope this delightful if frustrating novel finds an audience. Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style. Yes, he could rein in his rambling nature, but some readers will relish the ruminative nature of this mystery about love and murder among people bigger than life.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. Follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
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