Christopher: A Novel

5 out of 5

By Bookshare.org Volunteer on Jan 11, 2009

Allison Burnett, already an accomplished film director, screenwriter and playwright, now turns his deliciously acerbic quill to fiction, and leaves an indellible and much needed stain on the underwear that is modern American literature. Roll over Kerouac, Nabokov and Philip Roth, there is a new master among us.<p> The bewitching narrator of CHRISTOPHER, Allison Burnett's first novel (Broadway Books, 2003 $13.95), is named B. K. Troop. <p> Troop, a lonely middle-aged homosexual who becomes infatuated with the straight "boy next door", the eponymous Christopher Ireland, has to be one of the most beguiling and enchanting characters of American fiction. <p> Burnett's Troop is to New York City's gay romantics what Twain's Huckleberry Finn was to Southern White Trash. <p> An isolated, lonely, egotistical fantasist with a vast repertoire of literary, culinary and viticultural metaphors at his fingertips, Troop's melancholy song is at once seductively discordant and subtly harmonious. <p> If B.K. Troop has usurped the speckled throne of Manhattan's fictional queens, Troop's romantic quarry, Christopher, is the personification of America's jaded, disenfranchised intellectual nobility. Their interaction, day by day over twelve short but dramatic months, is both riveting and illuminating. <p> But this is no dualistic psychodrama: the thronging population of Manhattan's sleazy bars and diners, the waitress, the schoolgirl, the cult-leader, the ex-wife and, not least, the insidiously grotesque figure of Christopher's Clytemnestra-like mother, make for a Thanksgiving party the likes of which have never graced even the most exquisite literary table.<p> In a sparkling slice of life, set in 1984 in the shadowy decades before the much-needed epiphany of September 11, this extraordinary new book captures the indelible character of its tritagonist, New York City itself, in a way that only the finest writing can. <p> CHRISTOPHER is both unputtdownable and eminently revisitable, a jewel in modern fiction, destined to adorn the libraries of anyone who has even a modicum of taste in reading, to which I am delighted to give my highest recommendation. Five glorious, golden stars. A triumph of modern writing.