Now You See Him

by Eli Gottlieb

Overview

An author’s murder-suicide sends his childhood friend into the depths of obsession in this “mesmerizing blend of suspense and long-buried family secrets” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In his early twenties, Rob Castor won acclaim for his short stories. But that was a dozen years ago. After languishing in a state of creative paralysis, Rob’s descent into darkness ended with a violent flourish: he fatally shot his ex-girlfriend—herself a successful writer—before turning the gun on himself.

As the media takes hold of this sensational crime, unexpected revelations send shockwaves through Rob’s hometown in upstate New York. His childhood best friend Nick Framingham is determined to find some clue that will explain Rob’s actions. But as Nick’s quest turns increasingly obsessive, he begins to reevaluate his own life and marriage. Soon, a fault line opens up beneath him, one that will end the stable, quiet life he once knew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061850073
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
Sales rank:	464,891
File size:	611 KB

About the Author

Eli Gottlieb's New York Times Notable Book, The Boy Who Went Away, won the Rome Prize and the 1998 McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors. His second novel, Now You See Him, has been translated into eleven languages. He lives in New York City.www.eligottlieb.com

Read an Excerpt

Now You See Him
A Novel

Chapter One

At this late date, would it be fair to say that people, after a fashion, have come to doubt the building blocks of life itself? That we suspect our food? That we fear our children? And that as a result we live individually today atop pyramids of defensive irony, squinched into the tiny pointed place on the top and looking balefully out at the landscape below? In such a time of dark views and darker diagnoses, I'll forestall all second-guessing and declare it up front: I loved him. I'd grown up across the street from him. In my own way, I worshipped him. With the slavish adoration of a child, I'd tried briefly to be him. Although we were both boys the same age and although we chaffed and teased each other constantly, below it all ran an awareness on my part that there was always something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply drawn about him that set him apart from the rest of us.

His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you've heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his mid­twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid sleepy upstate New York town. Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide, causing the hot lights of the media to come on with an audible whoosh, and stay there, focused on his life, the town of his birth and, by default, we his friends and neighbors. In truth, it was fascinating, in a somewhat repulsive way, to watch how a lone wire­service story spilled outward, and the newsweeklies picked it up, and then, when it hit television, everything exploded in a bright and twinkling cloud ofcoverage. In the control rooms of America, apparently, they'd made the collective decision: this is the one. So within six days of the event, TV people were driving up from Manhattan and bivouacking in the Dorset Hotel, along with the big trucks with their sleek antennas and dishes, the over-made-up on-camera host women and anchormen looking all of them like something struck from the Stone Phillips mold and oozing a special kind of major-market insincerity.

For those of us who were his friends, even if we hadn't been in touch with him much these last years, there was the inevitable shock, followed by the inevitable (in my case) sorrow. For the rest of us in town, it was more about the transforming wave that ran through us on the heels of the media attention: that hot bolt of change that left us keenly aware of the way our bodies and faces might look in the rare air of television. By default, it seemed, we'd all become actors on a reality show dedicated to showing the rotten underbelly of innocent American small-town life. Except there was no rotten underbelly. This wasn't Columbine High School. This wasn't that sandy sad place where poor David Koresh preached and died. This was Monarch, New York, a trim, proud little town on a hill far enough away from the major urban centers that people still pause a second to consider before they speak.

But no matter. The weather was turning crisp, the apples had already swelled, reddened, and fallen from the trees, and suddenly too many of us were outside braving the cold while wandering the streets of the town in pretend idleness, hoping to be on the nightly news. It was undignified to see Major Wilkinson, our World War II vet and a man rumored to have squirreled away millions in silver coins, buying a whole new wardrobe (at eighty-five years of age!) and posing in a photo op each morning at the entrance to the Krispy Kreme like a Wal-Mart greeter gone mad. Old diaries and dusty storage boxes were ransacked for sellable artifacts, and there was a kind of unspoken lottery that was won by Hilary Margold, who unearthed a tattered browning piece of paper with Rob's unmistakable high school penmanship forming the words "question authority." It was authenticated, publicized in the local press, and in tribute to the perennial American hunger for morbid memorabilia, ended up on eBay, where it went for a pretty sum. All of us, whether we'd known Rob personally or not, walked around with a strange lifted feeling, like a freshening wind was blowing, and maybe that wind would bring something live and new into our lives.

For my part I participated in almost none of it. I was stunned by his death, and then doubly shocked by the extent of the pain it brought with it—a sharp piercing ache in a private place, way up inside, that hadn't been touched in years.

Now You See Him
A Novel. Copyright © by Eli Gottlieb. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Despite Nick's flaws, he succeeds in placing the intensity of male friendship at the heart of his story. The grief he and the other roadies feel is moving, as is his continuing loyalty to his dead friend. The reader's interest is snared and held by Nick's refusal to forget Rob's troubled life, his persistence in wondering how his friend could be driven to such violence…Nick doesn't answer the most interesting questions about Rob. What he does do, though—and remarkably well—is present a heartfelt picture of enduring friendship and inconsolable, debilitating grief, even if that grief is complicated by jaw-dropping revelations as the novel draws to a close.
—The New York Times

Danielle Trussoni

A mesmerizing blend of suspense and long-buried family secrets, Gottlieb's second novel (after 1997's The Boy Who Went Away) culminates in shocking revelations that rock a quiet upstate New York town. Nick Framingham is still reeling from the recent death of his childhood best friend, the writer Rob Castor, who committed suicide after killing his ex-girlfriend in Manhattan. Nick's own marriage to his college sweetheart, Lucy, begins to unravel as he struggles to understand what drove Rob to murder. Rekindling an old relationship with his first love, Belinda, Rob's volatile and beautiful sister, Nick begins to retrace not only Rob's last days but also their shared childhood, looking for clues to explain his friend's actions. Gottlieb skillfully ratchets up the suspense by doling out the details of Rob's death in bits and pieces, until everything falls into place in a startling conclusion that will rattle even the genre's most experienced readers. With his pitch-perfect dialogue and flawed yet empathetic characters, Gottlieb's sophomore effort should win him widespread recognition. (Feb.)

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Publishers Weekly

A midlife crisis in upstate New York. For plump, balding, 30-something Nick Framingham, with his "teetering marriage and dead-end job," things really start to unravel after his childhood friend Rob Castor, a successful but blocked writer, murders his girlfriend Kate, then commits suicide. Nick, the narrator of Gottlieb's second novel (The Boy Who Went Away, 1996) is a man of seemingly limited appeal-a self-proclaimed dork at school; distant with his wife Lucy and two sons; and out of touch with his emotionally cool parents, who seemed to love his brother (killed in a car crash) more. Now, despite Lucy's increasingly pointed warnings that their marriage is at risk, he seems happy to commit adultery with his old flame, Rob's sexpot sister, when she returns to Monarch, the small town where they all grew up. While drifting further from Lucy (whom he claims to love) and his children (whom he accuses Lucy of wooing away from him), Nick talks to his own aging parents, then Rob's poisonous mother, whose suggestion that he is illegitimate might explain his parents' lesser love for him. Two secrets are finally exposed, one which causes Nick to redefine himself, the other intended to explain his emotional torpor-although neither halts his downward slide. Sensational revelations arrive too late to enliven a smoothly written but sluggish and morose tale.

Kirkus Reviews