The Gimmicks
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“The Gimmicks is a gorgeous epic that astounds with its scope and beauty. With empathy and humor, McCormick unravels the ties between brotherhood and betrayal, love and abandonment, and the fictions we create to live with the pain of the past. This novel will blow you away.” —Brit Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers
Set in the waning years of the Cold War, a stunning debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history—the Armenian Genocide—whose traumatic reverberations will have unexpected consequences on all three lives.
This exuberant, wholly original novel begins in Kirovakan, Armenia, in 1971. Ruben Petrosian is a serious, solitary young man who cares about two things: mastering the game of backgammon to beat his archrival, Mina, and studying the history of his ancestors. Ruben grieves the victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, a crime still denied by the descendants of its perpetrators, and dreams of vengeance.
When his orphaned cousin, Avo, comes to live with his family, Ruben’s life is transformed. Gregarious and physically enormous, with a distinct unibrow that becomes his signature, Avo is instantly beloved. He is everything Ruben is not, yet the two form a bond they swear never to break.
But their paths diverge when Ruben vanishes—drafted into an extremist group that will stop at nothing to make Turkey acknowledge the genocide. Unmoored by Ruben’s disappearance, Avo and Mina grow close in his absence. But fate brings the cousins together once more, when Ruben secretly contacts Avo, convincing him to leave Mina and join the extremists—a choice that will dramatically alter the course of their lives.
Left to unravel the threads of this story is Terry “Angel Hair” Krill, a veteran of both the US Navy and the funhouse world of professional wrestling, whose life intersects with Avo, Ruben, and Mina’s in surprising and devastating ways.
Told through alternating perspectives, The Gimmicks is a masterpiece of storytelling. Chris McCormick brilliantly illuminates the impact of history and injustice on ordinary lives and challenges us to confront the spectacle of violence and the specter of its aftermath.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCormick's rambling debut novel (after the story collection Desert Boys) shows the continued influence of the Armenian genocide of 1915 far into the 20th century. The author dramatizes how it affects three teenage characters growing up in a village in Soviet Armenia in the 1970s: Ruben Petrosian, a teenager who lives to play backgammon; Mina Bagossian, his gaming rival; and Avo Gregoryan, Ruben's cousin, who's bigger than most kids and comes to live with the Petrosian family after the death of his parents in an industrial accident. Despite being opposites, both physically and temperamentally, the two cousins become as close as brothers, just as Avo and Mina fall in love. Ruben and Avo are eventually recruited by a secret Armenian liberation group that seeks vengeance for the 1915 genocide. Forced to leave Mina behind, Avo is sent to America, where he grows disillusioned with the cause and becomes what else, given his size a professional wrestler. In 1989, Mina contacts Avo's former wrestling manager to find out what happened to her one-time love. The novel covers much ground, geographically and historically, but never fully pulls together its disparate story elements. Still, there are enough secrets, lies, and betrayals to keep the reader turning the pages.
