07/25/2016
Finding peace and learning to deal with the consequences of one’s actions are just two of the many thematic currents pulsing through Maksik’s scorching third novel (after A Marker to Measure Drift). Set in various towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and hurtling back and forth in time from the early 1990s to the present, the bleak story is narrated by Joe March, whose mother, Anne-Marie, is sent to jail in 1991 when Joe is 20. Around the same time, Joe meets Tess—the love of his life—and after a period of brief separation, the two move to White Pine, Wash., where the prison is located. Anne-Marie’s crime—hammering a man to death in a grocery store parking for abusing his wife—soon attracts the admiration of female followers (including Tess) who have “run out of patience” and “have reached their limit” of what they’ll accept from men. In the second half of the book, Tess hatches a plot to punish a wife-beating neighbor and involves Joe, allowing Maksik to deliver a portrait of Joe’s bipolar disorder—which he describes as a “creeping tar” and “a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lung”—that is honest and devastating. Both the meandering story and the way Joe expresses his thoughts feel accurately claustrophobic. Where Maksik really excels is in his unrestrained depiction of a perpetually broken man who can’t help loving volatile, vulnerable Tess, all the while desperately figuring out how to forgive the woman who raised him. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (Sept.)
Shelter in Place
Narrated by James Patrick Cronin
Alexander MaksikUnabridged — 10 hours, 8 minutes
Shelter in Place
Narrated by James Patrick Cronin
Alexander MaksikUnabridged — 10 hours, 8 minutes
Overview
Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early '90s, Shelter in Place is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the consequences of all-consuming love.
Summer 1991. Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old working-class kid from Seattle, is on top of the world. He has just graduated college and his future beckons, unencumbered and magnificent. But Joe's life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of severe bipolar disorder and, shortly after, his mother kills a man she's never met with a hammer.
Joe moves to White Pine, Oregon, where his mother is in jail and his father has set up house to be near her. He is joined by Tess Wolff, a fiercely independent woman with whom he has fallen passionately in love. The lives of Joe, Tess, and Joe's father fall into the slow rhythm of daily prison visits and beer and pizza at a local bar. Meanwhile, Anne-Marie March, Joe's mother, is gradually becoming a local heroine as many begin to see her crime as a furious, exasperated act of righteous rebellion. Tess too has fallen under her spell. Spurred on by Anne-Marie's example, Tess enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.
With an eerie magnetism, a feel for the battered spirit of modern America comparable to that of the best contemporary fiction, and characters as relatable and memorable as Miles and Alaska in John Green's Looking for Alaska, Shelter in Place tells a story about the things in life we are willing to die for, and those for which we're willing to kill.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Shelter in Place
"Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order, and Shelter in Place is a sharp, dark, jagged music conjured out of poetry, pain and ecstatic bursts of beauty. This is a powerful book."
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
" Shelter in Place is a magnificent novel. Alexander Maksik charts the legacy of violence and the limits of justice with grace, power, and clarity."
—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno
"An unsettling and beautiful exploration of mental illness, love, violence, family and sexual politics. Maksik’s artful story outruns all sorts of received ideas and cliched narratives, and slips into deeply original territory. You’ll be haunted by it in the best possible way."
—Katie Roiphe, author of The Violet Hour and In Praise of Messy Lives
"Unsettling and honest, a remarkably insightful portrait of mental illness, Shelter in Place is elegiac, savage and mournful, a beautifully written novel about the echoes of our actions, of love and its consequences."
—Aminatta Forna, author of The Hired Man and The Memory of Love
" Shelter In Place is a love story like none I’ve ever read before. Lust, longing, betrayal, revenge—it’s all here, but only when and where you least expect it. Densely ruminative, and bracingly unromantic, the ballad of Tess, Joe, and his parents tests the brutal outer-limits of patriarchy, the bleak realities of untreated mental illness, and the nature of loyalty in a world where every woman is out for herself. And every man, as well."
—Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own
" Shelter in Place takes a brilliant look at the fractured, jagged nature of masculinity, at how gender warps consciousness in ways we struggle and fail to understand. Maksik writes from inside the fire of a mind unfiltered, unsettled, unresigned, a mind it would be too simple to call unwell. The narrator’s episodes of mania are glittering raptures, electric; his descents into the infinite nothingness of depression drawn so true to that state of absence, of blindness, of Styron’s ‘darkness visible,’ you feel all the numb trapped terror of it. This book’s cutting, unchecked prose makes you an accomplice to violence, and leads you to realize we all are—formed and directed by cruelty, whether as victims, agents, warriors, survivors, or witnesses. Shelter in Place poses the hard, important, and perhaps unanswerable question—how do you live with your self?
—Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back
"There's something truly exhilarating about reading a novel that's so audaciously original, so inventive and let's be honest, so sort of weird that you want to put it in the hands of just about everyone you know. And that's a perfect description of Alexander Maksik's stunningly unsettling third novel, Shelter in Place."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Maksik has an expansive and affecting vision of human capacity. He also evokes time and place particularly well — early 1990s Washington here is as vivid as Santorini or Paris in his other books."
— The New York Times
"A riveting, darkly beautiful novel . . . poised to be one of the big books of the season – the kind of sweeping story that encompasses so much of what it is to be human."
—Departures
"Sensual, musical... Shelter in Place is as unquestionably brilliant as it is painful; a rare meditation on mania, depression, and the rage of youth."
—The Huffington Post
"Alexander Maksik’s riveting and disturbing novel Shelter in Place is a totally original exploration of mental illness, sexual politics, family and violence."
—The Guardian
“Alexander Maksik covers fresh ground with each new work. In poetic bursts…[he] captures [his characters’] inner convulsions while exploring the passions that can drive, and destroy, us.”helter in Place,” is an exceptional look at the vagaries of bi-polar disorder, as well as a powerful consideration of family (both blood and chosen), violence against women (and in response to that violence), and the overwhelming power of love (even when that love comes at a high cost).”
—Vanity Fair
" Shelter in Place is an exceptional look at the vagaries of bi-polar disorder, as well as a powerful consideration of family (both blood and chosen), violence against women (and in response to that violence), and the overwhelming power of love (even when that love comes at a high cost)."
—The Cedar Rapids Gazette
"[A] striking narrative. . . Maksik's Joe March is a man for today as much as Ishmael and Stephen were for Melville's and Joyce's days."
—Shelf Awareness
"Maksik describes the highs and lows of bipolar disorder with heartbreaking beauty and terror."
—Angel City Review
" Shelter in Place subverts the Manic Pixie Dream Girl by taking her to her extreme conclusion. ...This is a book about the women in Joe’s life– mothers and lovers, sisters and strangers– but it manages to be feminist, angry, and deeply moving."
—Book Riot
“An incredibly courageous novel that delves deeply into issues of love, gender, violence and mental illness.”
— Chuck Robinson of Village Books in Publisher’s Weekly
“On every page we're reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.”
— Kirkus Reviews
"[A] scorching third novel. Maksik [delivers] a portrait of bipolar disorder…that is honest and devastating."
— Publishers Weekly
“Maksik is one of the most exacting and daring writers we have . . . from the first sentence there’s no turning away from this story.”
—Literary Hub
"Delicately nuanced, this mini saga of an America that lays just behind the headlines is full of emotions, lacerating but true to life in that it is about a recognisable form of everyday life and digs up feelings we all have inevitably had at times."
—Lovereading
Praise For the New York Times Notable Book, A Marker to Measure Drift
“A bold book, and an instructive one. . . . [Maksik] has illuminated for us, with force and art, an all too common species of suffering.”
—Norman Rush, The New York Times Book Review
“No novel I read this year affected me more powerfully than A Marker to
Measure Drift. ”
—Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
“A truly breathtaking accomplishment . . . a work of stupendous imagination,
like Dave Eggers’ What is the What , or (dare I say?) like Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn.”
— Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure
“Beautiful...It will leave you breathless and speechless; it will send you reeling.”
— The San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for You Deserve Nothing
“Immensely powerful . . . Beautifully written . . .”
— The Boston Globe
“A wonderful debut novel.”
— The Denver Post
"A novel rivetingly plotted and beautifully written. . . [Maksik] writes about the moral ambiguity of Will's circumstances with dazzling clarity and impressive philosophical rigor."
—Adam Langer, The New York Times
“A powerful, absorbing novel . . . Maksik is an unusually gifted writer.”
—Tom Perrotta, author of The Abstinence Teacher and The Leftovers
“Here is a writer who understands why the artful telling of a difficult story is a brave and important thing to do.”
—John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road
“A provocative, constantly surprising, and original novel. This is a thrilling debut.”
—Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut
11/15/2016
In the 1990s Pacific Northwest, Joseph March is a happy-go-lucky guy fresh out of college and uninterested in following snooty older sister Claire's quest for a better, more cultured life when he's hit by an overwhelming sense of inertness, as if he were drowning in tar. He's suffering from the onset of bipolar disorder, something he soon realizes that he shares with his mother, who's always been rather wayward but has now been convicted of beating a man to death with a hammer. Joe's father sells his business and moves near the prison where his wife is confined. Joe eventually follows, reluctantly leaving behind the passionate, electric Tess, with whom he's deeply in love. But Tess comes after him, and what unfolds is an exacting tale of desperate people taking desperate measures as they crash up against the enduring rock of love. VERDICT Maksik (A Marker To Measure Drift) perfectly captures the weight of mental illness, the ache of longing and uncertainty, and the complexity of human relationships. Highly recommended.
2016-06-22
Maksik firmly creates the "place" as the Pacific Northwest, though his characters have a difficult time finding any kind of "shelter"—from place or from each other.After graduating from an undemanding college, Joe March finds himself a bit lost. He works part time as a bartender and meets Tess Wolff, a free-spirited young woman with something of a wild streak. Besides developing a relationship with Tess, two things haunt Joe's life. First, he starts to feel the beginnings of bipolar disorder, a disease he characterizes with the metaphors of "tar" and "a bird" whose talons grip him fiercely. Second, Joe's mother, Anne-Marie, witnesses an act of bullying in a grocery store parking lot, and she takes action by seizing a framing hammer and killing the perpetrator of the violence. (Her defense is weakened by the fact that she delivers seven blows with the hammer, which suggests the level of her rage.) She's tried, found guilty, and given five-to-25 years. Maksik offers up all of this plot in a chronologically convoluted narrative, moving back and forth to various fragments of his characters' complicated histories. This strategy serves the narrative well, for it emphasizes the recurring significance of family ties and obligations. After an initial separation, Tess eventually finds Joe and visits Anne-Marie in prison. Along with a number of other women, Tess finds herself admiring Anne-Marie for taking a definitive stand against domestic violence, and she persuades Joe and Seymour, a bouncer at a local bar as well as a prison guard, to get involved in a wacko plot to take revenge on a local college professor who's physically abusing his wife. On every page we're reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169635065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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