Greetings from Asbury Park
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel
In a small seaside city on the Jersey Shore, three half-siblings confront the death of a distant and bullying patriarch. They now have the chance to imagine new relationships and new futures, ones that would have been near-unthinkable while their father was alive.
Caught in their crossfire are the conservative religious communities that border Asbury Park, the longtime locals who have been pushed to the fringe by the shore’s revitalization, and the legendary town upon which the whole world seems to converge. Slowly, however, they come to understand that everything—their future, their happiness—depends on whether they can face themselves.
Wise, perceptive, and provocative, Greetings from Asbury Park is a remarkable literary debut in the tradition of great American novels such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It is a deep interrogation of place that depicts flawed characters as they break through to adulthood, truth, and to a moral relationship with the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turtel's convoluted debut revolves around three half-siblings whose lives intersect following the death of their wealthy despotic father, Joseph Larkin. Firstborn heir apparent Davey, 25, is flatly portrayed as a self-centered skirt-chaser who is addicted to pills and alcohol. Then there's the illegitimate younger son Casey, a lost soul and the primary narrator, who, after being abandoned by his mother as an adolescent, moved in with Davey in Asbury Park, N.J. The third sibling, a surprise to both young men, is jazz singer Gabriella, 18, whose mother was the Larkin maid. The half-brothers' friendship is tested when Gabriella enters the picture and begins a romantic relationship with Casey, and things get worse after Davey has a tryst with an underage girl from the neighboring Orthodox Syrian Jewish community, which prompts a revenge plot. Turtel tacks a lot of hot-button topics against the backdrop of a Jersey Shore town struggling to rebuild in the years after Superstorm Sandy, mixes stream-of-consciousness riffs with violent set pieces, and makes confusing switches between first- and third-person narration—but, to what end, is unclear. In the end, it's too much of a jumble.
