Publishers Weekly
04/17/2017
Eisenstadt’s (From Rockaway) detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman’s cast-off tchotchkes. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Glassmans move from their small, suddenly uninhabitable Tribeca apartment with their two daughters (and one on the way) to a Rockaway beach house, bought for them by Sue Glassman’s father-in-law, Sy. To Sue’s chagrin, this is on the condition that Sy move in with them—and that Sue convert to Judaism. Moreover, the house is falling apart and full of the prior owner’s possessions. Rose, an elderly Italian lady, shows up at their doorstep in a wheelchair demanding her house back and her garden restored. She spends multiple afternoons sitting in the Glassmans’ garden, accusing them of conspiring to swindle her. Heavily pregnant, Sue wants nothing more than to be rid of the pesky former owner and her old junk. But the more Sue learns about Rose and the house, the more she comes to see how intertwined the two really are. In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11—memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life—the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected. (June)
From the Publisher
"Eisenstadt's detailed and eclectic novel takes readers to a dilapidated oceanfront house full of secrets, ghosts, and an old woman's cast-off tchotchkes....In this touching portrait of ordinary people grappling with the aftershocks of 9/11—memorials, uncertainty, death, and a new life—the emotional upheaval of a national tragedy leaves no one unaffected."
—Publishers Weekly
"Swell combines comedy and tragedy, chaos and a longing for order."—Hillel Italie, Associated Press
"With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor....A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community."
—Kirkus Reviews
"In her new novel, Swell, Jill Eisenstadt comes back to Rockaway, and this visit revolves around historical events of recent decades....Swell is anchored in real understanding of the people of Rockaway, what they went through in those years and their recourse to black humor."—Newsday
"Moving, dark, and funny."—David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"With a pitch-perfect narrative voice and plenty of humor, Eisenstadt captures the lives of her Mets-loving and Yankee-hating characters in vivid detail."—Booklist
"Mordantly funny."
—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
"Comic, dark...layered with ghosts and guilt and demons. It plays with our notions of heroes and heroism, and jabs at our one-dimensional instinct to deify in the face of tragedy."—Casey Barrett, Village Voice
Kirkus Reviews
2017-03-21
In the immediate wake of 9/11, a young family uproots their lives in Manhattan to resettle in a ramshackle Rockaway beach house—and, over the course of one momentous weekend, finds a whole lot more drama than they bargained for.Desperate for a new place to live and short on cash, Dan and Sue Glassman are vulnerable when Dan's curmudgeonly father, Sy, makes them an offer too convenient to refuse: if Sue, now pregnant with the couple's third child, will finally convert to Judaism, Sy will buy the family a beach house in Rockaway, with the controversial caveat that he'll also live there. And this time, though she has resisted conversion for years, Sue acquiesces: "Blame hormones or love or the post-terror downtown stench, but moving suddenly seemed like the only option." But the house comes with baggage of its own, and when the previous owner, Rose—a plucky 90-year-old who, less than a decade earlier, got away with (literal) murder in the dining room—wheels up to the front door the weekend of Sue's conversion party and refuses to leave, the family's best-laid plans are thrown into chaos. If Rose is telling the truth, the house has been sold without her consent; if she isn't, the fact remains that they still have to figure out what to do with the geriatric force of nature squatting on the premises. But while they don't know it, the Glassmans have something of an unlikely guardian in their next-door neighbor Tim Ray, a divorced ex-firefighter with half a nose who's haunted by the mistakes of his booze-soaked past and feels an inexplicable attachment to the family. With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt (Kiss Out, 1991, etc.) captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor, though her zany and colorful characters never quite manage to transcend their laundry lists of quirks to become fully human. But what the novel lacks in nuance, it makes up in heart. A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community that mostly hits the mark.
