Crazy Sorrow
-
- $21.99
Publisher Description
A lyrical novel, spanning four decades in New York City, about a couple torn apart and the lengths to which they will go to be reunited.
Vince Passaro’s first novel, 2002’s Violence, Nudity, Adult Content, was a provocative book that explored the darkest human emotions and the traumas of mental illness, sexual assault, and murder. Now, nearly twenty years later, Passaro is back with his follow-up, Crazy Sorrow, a novel that is equally explosive and more grand in scope.
The story opens in the shadow of the new World Trade Center, on July 4, 1976, when students George and Anna meet on the weed- and wine-fueled night of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. George, haunted by his upbringing, instantly falls for the sensual, magnetic Anna. Soon, they couple up, dropping acid, swapping music, exploring the city and each other. Yet their romance is short-lived, and they go their own ways.
Passaro chronicles the next four decades, following George and Anna through their various relationships, their sex lives both youthful and mature, their failed marriages, and the travails of parenthood and their careers. Yet as the years go by one thing remains constant: the former lovers wonder what happened to each other. Finally, miraculously, they reconnect as the new century is beginning, only to discover that history itself will have a say in whether they can stay together.
Crazy Sorrow is an ambitious examination of the forces that draw people together and drive them apart—yet it also expands beyond the points of view of its characters to capture the movement of time and to reveal a living, breathing New York that is both constantly changing and always familiar. Crazy Sorrow stands as Passaro’s powerful love letter to his characters and to the city that has shaped them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Passaro's ambitious second novel (after Violence, Nudity, Adult Content), four decades of American life are explored through two characters who meet on July 4, 1976, as America celebrates its bicentennial. As fireworks burst over Lower Manhattan, Columbia student George Langland, almost 20, meets Barnard student Anna Goff, and they begin an intense but short-lived affair. The novel tracks their separate paths as Anna becomes a high-powered attorney with a white shoe firm and George drifts from job to job until he partners with Burke, who owns a coffee truck and has a vision, which he ultimately turns into an empire of 2,670 coffee bars, making himself and George incredibly wealthy in the process. Both George and Anna marry, divorce, and have numerous relationships with men and women, but they never entirely forget one another until chance finally throws them together again in 2000. Passaro uses George and Anna and their friends—Arthur, a photographer, and Louis, a playwright who writes an Angels in America–like play about AIDS—to dramatize the changes in American life from the 1970s to the present. Filled with memorable scenes and characters, this has plenty of pithy things to say about sex, love, and relationships. The result is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.
