New work in The Brooklyn Rail

Brooklyn Rail, June 2015
I have an excerpt of a novel-in-progress in the June issue of The Brooklyn Rail. My last few novels have been more traditional, in terms of having a plot and a firm point of view, but for this I've been revisiting the forms that served me so well in Could You Be With Her Now, maybe even more abstract. A member of my family committed suicide last spring, and I've been fascinated by writing a novel in which the pieces are "put together," erroneously or not, based on the information at hand, people's recollections of events, things left behind. For we can never know what's going on in someone's mind, can we, why they decide to pull the trigger? All we have are the flotsam and jetsam floating in the —there is no black box.

There are some great novels out there that already approach this vein—Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and Michael Kimball's Dear Everybody, which I consider a departure point for my own work here:


"She gave life to the sudoku digest by the bedside and the collected poetry of Sylvia Plath, open on the floor to—dear God—"Lady Lazarus," to the Dearform slippers next to the bed and the plaid robe with pilled elbows and irregularly bent lapels."

To read the entire excerpt, go here.