On the man-boy – Tom Seymour Evans in TLS:

‘Ethan Aspern is a new iteration of a character who has become as familiar to the fictional New York of the early twenty-first century as the yuppie was to that of the late twentieth. The Brookhattanite indie man-boy wears messenger bags and sunglasses, then faces some individualizing choices: denim or leather, Vans or Chuck Taylors. Though he presumably took coke at gigs in the early 2000s, he is domiciled narcotically among the downers. He is a postlapsarian figure, fallen from the paradises of DIY guitar music (see Daniel Svoboda in Nell Zink’s Doxology, 2019), tenure-track academia (see Chip Lambert in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, 2001) or Web 1.0 (see several characters in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, 2013). An important relationship stands flaming in his middle distance, and for this loss he can’t blame anyone but himself, though he’ll try to.
At the beginning of The Second Coming Garth Risk Hallberg’s man-boy has suffered his ultimate expulsion – from New York. Seeking refuge from addiction and family breakdown, he is living in a “halfway-halfway house” on Santa Catalina Island, California, and therefore inhabiting a joke about both rehab and westerliness. At its Hebraic root, Ethan’s first name means “steadfast”, and his surname is homophonous with a tree, the aspen, whose variety name is “quivering”. Hallberg’s second novel is less socioeconomically ranging than his first, City on Fire (2015), and will thus prompt fewer comparisons with Charles Dickens, but with names as comic-instructive as this, he won’t shake the association altogether. Ethan Aspern: firm and flaky, decent and suspect. And therein lies the question that engages us in the man-boy, or that Hallberg hopes will: can you trust him?’

(…)

‘Ethan’s initial plan is to stay in New York only for a little while, but if there’s one thing we know about the Brookhattanite indie man-boy, it’s that his plans mean nothing: they’re rotten with self-deception from the get-go. And he exists to be douched in nasty, character-testing surprises by whoever is writing him. Via his ex-probation officer, Ethan ends up getting a job looking after other people’s dogs. Meanwhile, incapable of living with Sarah any longer, Jolie moves in with her maternal grandparents. Albert Kupferberg is an emeritus professor of literature and does what literary professors do best in works of realism, which is to mule the author’s preferred literary allusions into the text; Eleanor Kupferberg provides a good opportunity for one of Hallberg’s giddiest prose habits, which is the rendering of proper nouns into other parts of speech: “Back in June, he’d noticed the white blaze at her temple starting to range Warholically through her slate-coloured hair, but now she’d pulled it back into a tight demi-Sontag”. When the opportunity arises to exploit Albert and Eleanor’s grandparental cluelessness, Ethan retrieves Jolie from them and drives her down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he grew up.’

Read the review here.

The deadliness of summarizations.

The plans mean nothing. Or as Adam Phillips put it in is book on Monogamy. ‘Our commitment to monogamy depends on our appetite. And on our appetite for appetite.’

Some people have an appetite for the rendering of proper nouns into other parts of speech. Better than no appetite.