Aaron KrachCritiques

From the artist:

“From July 19-26, 2012, I checked out every available book in the New York Public Library written by an author who committed suicide. I stamped each book’s title page with this information and exhibited the collection in How to Write a Novel at Field Projects, NYC. At the end of the show, all the stamped books were returned to general circulation at NYPL.”
The book includes scans of the title page of each book in the exhibition.

This was a free book from the author on LibraryThing. I finished the book, but the story didn't grab me until page 150; even then, there were times where I was missing something: I just didn't get it. The writing was fine, I guess it was the story that didn't excite me. I gave it my best shot, at least I finished it.

Half-life by Aaron Krach is the second book that I've received through LibraryThing's Member Giveaways program, a spin-off of the Early Reviewers program. It's an interesting coincidence that both of the books I won were about gay men and that neither of them were really coming-out stories. But the two have few similarities beyond that--King of Cats follows an older, well-established English guitarist and those surrounding him while Half-life follows Adam, a southern Californian teenager just starting out, and his friends and family. One thing I hadn't realized when I submitted my request for Half-life was that it was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2004 for best debut novel. So, when I found that out, and when I found out that I had won the drawing for the book, I was very excited to read it.

Adam Westman is a senior at Angelito High School in Los Angeles with nothing much but finals and graduation to look forward to. He does still need to find a job for the summer to earn a bit of extra cash before heading to Standford to study English literature. But the sudden death of his father Greg changes everything and nothing. He still has his close friends Dart and Fran to hang out at the "Sev" with, and he never really felt that his father was there for him or his sister Sandra anyways. Now his self-absorbed mother Vivian has to start paying more attention and his stepfather Marc is doing his best to be there for them all. But along with death comes a chance at love--cop Jeff Manfield was one of the officers present at the scene of Greg's death. Although twenty years older than Adam, the two men have a romantic attraction for one another even considering the circumstances of their meeting.

Half-life is somewhat a slow, quiet book, which isn't to say that there aren't personal crises or conflicts because there certainly are--Krach simply isn't in your face about it. The story doesn't have a intense plot, it is about everyday people going about their everyday lives; feelings are going to get hurt and misunderstanding are bound to occur. So while the book isn't very flashy or over-dramatic, it still has quite a bit of feeling to it. The entire story takes place in 1999 between June 6 and June 21--two weeks that are magnified and closely examined day by day. I particularly enjoyed this technique since it showed just how important the little, and big, things in life really are.

Half-life provides a glimpse into the lives of its many primary and secondary characters. I was expecting the story to be mostly about Adam, but while he serves as a focal point the book is really about everyone, their relationships with one another, and the occasional missed connection. It is also a book about transitions and how people deal with them--or don't. Adam and his classmates are graduating, getting read to face "real life." His family circumstances change as they all adjust to the loss of his father. And falling in love will make other demands. Krach's storytelling is a prominent feature of the book; I was always very aware of the narrator and the fact that I was being told a story. The style is flippant and sassy with asides directed towards the reader every now and then. While Krach's style might be distracting for some, I found myself quite taken with it and enjoyed the book immensely.

Experiments in Reading½

I liked this book. At first I was concerned about the age difference and the thought of a high school age boy attracting an older police officer, but found the characters to be believable.

The only drawback was that I wanted the story to continue. I felt as if I was left hanging.

It took me some time to get into the flow of the book, and maybe for the book to really hit it's stride. Once there, about 1/3 of the way in, the book unfolds at a calm and deep pace that makes you think about the pace in LA, the pace of the deep waves coming in for the surfers, and the pace of the character's lives. The language and the timing, juxtaposed with the significant events occurring in Adam's life in the short time of the book were a large part of the story for me.

There are a lot of things to like about this novel, and reading about the first days after high school graduation brings back many memories, but I wanted to share how much I enjoyed reading it when I spent time thinking about how the language was paced.

This was one of the first ever book I read. I was excited to read about coming out stories, and it would usually revolve around teenagers. I felt this book was written in two angles.

One was Adam dealing with his family. Heavy stuff.

The second one was Adam and Jeff, which was 'teen beat' stuff, which I thought was cute, except that I was already drained by the first stuff.

And maybe I was being silly, but as I continued to read the book, I kept wondering why not Adam and his best friend? Why did Adam have to wait around until he met a guy like Jeff?

But you know what.. for a book like this, which I have read years ago, and yet the story still lingers in my head, it has to be something special. Some books - I can't even remember the storylines.

I found the book intriguing because this was a story about a style of life that I have not been privy to. However, Jeff, the policeman and his relationship with Adam was true and it comes across in the pages. I'll wait for the next novel...

This deceptively amiable first novel tells the sometimes dark, affecting story of a gay teenager's last weeks of high school in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles. To his credit, author Aaron Krach avoids all the pitfalls of the typical gay youth novel; his Adam is already happily aware and accepting of his homosexuality and does not, during the course of the story, actually come out to anyone who does not already know. Instead, Krach casts a wider net, exploring Adam's complicated relationships with family, friends and, ultimately, his lover, to speak of the fundamental need for human connection.

Eighteen year old Adam Westman is a child of divorce. He and his world weary eleven year old sister, Sandra, live with their father, a school teacher who has suffered from severe depression all his life, almost to the point of being non-functional. Both children are somewhat estranged from their mother, who has remarried and is obsessively involved in her work running a successful film production company. It's not surprising then that Adam has grown up self-reliant and cynical. But fairly early in the story, a rather shocking tragedy forces the family, as well as several of Adam's high school friends and a dashing local police officer, into unexplored, alien, sometimes uneasy relationships with one another.

There is much to recommend HALF LIFE. Without exception, the characters are well defined and mostly quite engaging. The storyline, of a dysfunctional family pulling together and re-defining itself in a time of grief (also explored in Trebor Healey's lovely THROUGH IT CAME BRIGHT COLORS), is given enough breathing room to develop quite organically and believably. The love story, between Adam and Jeff, the thirty eight year old cop whom he meets under unfortunate circumstances, also plays out deliciously slowly. Unfortunately, the book's simple, poignant moments are offset by way too much extraneous dialogue (of the snappy, snarky variety) that slows down the forward motion of the story, not to mention making the book's gay characters (Jeff, Adam and his schoolmates Dart, Fran and Veronica) occasionally appear to be self-consciously glib and shallow. Plus, Krach portrays his only two straight adult female characters, Adam's mother Vivian, and Jeff's partner Sue, as outdated, vaguely offensive, stereotypes - the cold, de-feminised businesswoman and the desperate, calorie obsessed faghag, respectively.

But all in all, I found HALF LIFE to be very enjoyable, as it offers an emotionally resonant, stylish alternative to the glut of LGBT coming out novels on the market, to say nothing of its odd, but strangely moving, Raymond Carver-esque epilogue. Three and half stars.½

Half-life is not an easy story, above all for who, like me, has suffered a loss of a dear one: how can Adam behave in that way? The book follows two weeks in the life of Adam (starting the 6 of June 1999, 6/6/99, you can up turn the date and it is always 6699, it's just a case?), a 18 years old gay boy from Angelito, an imaginary suburb town of Los Angeles.

Adam being gay is not the main issue in the story, and this maybe makes this book different from the usual coming of age stories; Adam has not hidden secrets, unbearable pains or vengeance feelings. Adam is gay, but so is his best friend Dart and his friend Fran, who has two 'moms' and a girlfriend. Adam is gay and it seems that no one has a problem with it... and maybe this is the problem: Adam craves the attention of his family, but they are inhexistent. When Adam's mother divorced from her husband, she apparently divorced also from her children and now they see her every other weekends, if she is not too taken with her work and with her new up-class lifestyle and husband. Adam's father is depressed, he didn't expect his life to be like that, he loves his children, but now that they start to be independent, he seems to not have any more reason to live. He is clearly in a down fall phase and it seems that only Adam sees that.

Adam wants to be a teen, he has the right to be a teen, but in this situation it's not possible for him; his teen years are running away, high school is near to end and adulthood is around the corner. All his friends are craving to reach the point, all of them but Adam. And to make the thing worst, Adam meets Jeff, 38 years old cop and gay. Where Adam is older than his age, Jeff is younger. He realized later in his life what he wanted to be, and so now he is still in a growing phase, he is still learning from life and he is still building his future.

There are big life changing events in the book, but it seems like they are in an undertone; it's like if you are waiting for something to happen, time is hanging up, but when something happens, it's not yet the trigger event, and so you go on waiting for the next one. In the end nothing happens and all happens... since what it seems big from a near perspective, in the big game of life is only a little piece without importance.

Half-life is more a novel about details than the telling of the 'great discovery' of Adam; Adam doesn't need to grow, he just did that. Maybe this is the most unsettling thing of the book... the reader is waiting for something that will change Adam, and instead all happens around him, and he stays alike; he has so much protective layers around him that nothing apparently arms him... but then, it's only two insignificant weeks... a great loss, graduation, a new lover... for everyone else but Adam, changing life events, for Adam a reason more to add a protective layer around him. What, or who, or when he will let go all his layers you didn't know.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1555838545/?tag=elimyrevandra-20

I soooo wanted this to be great. It sounded good -- a love story between 18 year old Adam and 38 year old Jeff, the cop investigating the death of Adam's father. I thought, okay, this could be really good... it could delve into the culture of older man-younger man relationships, explore both the joys and guilts... and in this particular story there could have been so much depth. Is Adam latching onto Jeff because he needs a father figure? Even if the answer is NO, it was something to consider.

Why is Jeff attracted to Adam? We don't know. There are pages and pages of dialogue in which Adam is supposedly witty and wise for his age, and we are TOLD that the conversation is flowing easily... yet the whole thing reads completely stilted and fake.

Why is Adam attracted to Jeff? No idea. Jeff is the blandest most boring male ever put to page.

Then we've got the author describing every.single.detail.

Adam took the lid off the barbecue. The coals he stacked earlier were still in their slightly pyramidal shape. He reached down and grabbed the bottle of lighter fluid he'd set out along with a box of wooden matches. He popped open the cap and started soaking the coals. He kept squirting till the bottle was half empty.

Imagine reading a whole book like that. Every movement is described in minute detail, even during conversation. Aargh. Yeah. It took me something like three weeks to get through this. I should have just given up.