Book Review: 'The Astral'

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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

"The Astral" is the name of a new novel from Kate Christensen. It's also the name of an aging Brooklyn apartment building that the book's troubled hero has long called home. That is until the novel begins and his world is turned upside down. Alan Cheuse has our review.

ALAN CHEUSE: Love and aging are the operative words in this book. The main character, once well-known poet Harry Quirk, has reached his late-50s, at the end of his marriage and the end of his rope for what seems to him no good reason - or really, no reason at all.

Luz, his wife of many years, believing he's cheated on her, has thrown him out of their apartment in the Astral and we range around the Brooklyn neighborhood with Harry as he drinks, rolls along around on his bike looking for a new place to live, and writes a long narrative poem with the title - you guessed it -"The Astral."

And as the novel shifts into a higher gear, he tries to keep the peace with his lesbian daughter. She lives as a freegan, which is to say someone who forages for food and such from local dumpsters. And along with her, Harry tries to save his son from the clutches of a Long Island Christian cult.

Harry, as Christensen portrays him in her closely laid on prose, is moody, introspective, with a heady intelligence in motion that colors every sentence in the book. He's seeking in life the same sort of transcendence he finds in poetry.

Good luck, Harry. But how fortunate you are to have a writer as gifted as Kate Christensen, who knows her men as well as some male writers believe they know their women, dramatizing your Brooklyn ups and downs. Her novel is definitely an up.

Kate Christensen's new novel is called "The Astral." Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

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