The Second Coming
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in 2011, her estranged dad, Ethan, seems like the furthest thing from her mind. A convicted felon and recovering addict, Ethan has always struggled to see past himself. But then a call from his ex makes him fear their daughter's in deeper trouble than anyone realises. Believing he's the only one who can save her, he decides to return to New York with a gift: the whole of his life, its hard-won triumphs and harrowing mistakes...
So begins the intimate epic of Jolie and Ethan: child and adult, apart and together, different yet the same. Their journey toward each other will face opposition from grandparents and siblings and friends. It will strain connections with roommates and benefactors and a probation officer desperate to help. It will push Jolie out past her depth with a mysterious admirer, and Ethan in over his head with his first love, Jolie's mom. But as father and daughter struggle to find their footing, new vistas beckon: from a surf break in mid-'90s Delaware to group therapy during the Great Recession, from an encampment at Occupy Wall Street to a HoJo on Maryland's Eastern Shore, from the heights of the Brooklyn Bridge to horizons seldom seen in fiction.
The Second Coming is at once an incandescent feat of storytelling and an exploration of an enduring mystery: Can we ever really outrun the past, stay true to ourselves while still chasing something new? Full of music and pathos and passion, this beautifully attuned work of fiction makes good Garth Risk Hallberg's extraordinary promise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hallberg's meandering latest (after City on Fire) traces the tentative reunion between an estranged father and his teenage daughter. It's 2011 and Ethan Aspern, a recovering heroin addict who's been in and out of prison for a series of small-time drug busts, has endured a lifetime of depression. His 13-year-old daughter, Jolie, lives with her mother, Sarah, in Upper Manhattan. When Ethan learns Jolie was nearly hit by a subway train after trying to recover her dropped phone from the tracks, he senses she's having problems of her own and vows to help set her straight. Long flashbacks elaborate on Ethan's uneven history with Sarah, his descent into addiction, and his winding path toward recovery, hobbled in part by an ingrained sense that he's not worth saving ("Talk of changed lives had the same effect on Ethan as the shibboleths of AA... which was a kind of gag reflex of solitude, like he was the last person on earth shut out of these simple doctrines of subjection and oneness and love"). A climactic Thanksgiving scene poses the question: might a repentant father and his rebellious daughter save each other? The novel is awash with gritty details and gutting emotional insights, but there's an overabundance of purple prose and the drawn-out payoff is only semirewarding. This doesn't quite scale the heights of Hallberg's breakout.
