This is a good one, especially if you're at all interested in the lovely lost architecture of New York -- or really of any great city that feels it must constantly reinvent itself in the name of progress.

Manhattan of the early 1970s serves as a backdrop for our hero, Griffin, as he moves through early high school. He's torn between his divorced artistic parents and his interest in architecture begins as a way to become closer to his mercurial, unpredictable, obsessive father.

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Griffin Watts, a typical NYC kid, lives in a brownstone (although his mother takes in boarders to make it work), loves the Mets and has been known to go "turd watching" at the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin. It's 1974 and the city is in default, overrun with garbage and neglect. Griffin's life is also in shambles. His parents are separated, his father disappears, the brownstone is going into foreclosure, and his new girlfriend, Dani, has moved to Philadelphia.

Before going into hiding, Griffin's father has roped him into stealing architectural ornamentation off of buildings, and even most of an entire building. Griffin questions "whether the tasks my father had in mind for me were reasonable things for a grown man to ask of a thirteen year-old boy who wanted only to get close to him," but he does it.

Griffin's father treats as "sacred objects" (as Joseph Mitchell once wrote in about New York architectural ornamentation in an article that ended up in The New Yorker) the parts of the buildings that are constantly being destroyed in the city. If only he held the same regard for Griffin.

Unrequited love of family and the same love for the ever-changing nature of the city and its architecture are at the center of this story. ( )

The audiobook was narrated by the author, Gill. It is a fascinating (and hopefully completely true) account of this man’s childhood, and father’s obsession with His City, and it’s buildings.
While some parts of this novel may seemed to have dragged on, for some reviewers, sticking with it until the very end is worth it. (And while the ending was not surprising, it was rather sad).
3.5 stars, and recommended. ( )

Full review at TheBibliophage.com

John Freeman Gill’s The Gargoyle Hunters is a paean to New York City architecture and bad parenting. It’s also a tender, hilarious coming of age story. Set in the 1970s, I did a lot of reminiscing as I read.

In brief, Griffin Watts becomes a teen as he tells us the story of his life at the time. His parents are “creative types” who are newly separated. Griffin is navigating the changes in himself, his family, and the city around him. The main parental character is his dad Nick, who has a seriously unhealthy obsession with architectural carvings. Griffin gets involved in his business because he wants to spend time with his dad.

Gill does a masterful job of describing the soon-to-be lost beauty of old New York. As one character says, “The only city worth saving is the city we have lost.” During the 70s the city went through a period of intense urban renewal, and Nick Watts is broken hearted about it. He also sees it as an opportunity to boldly pilfer (or as he says rescue) gargoyles, keystones, carvings, columns, etc. All of Gill’s descriptions make me want to take my camera and walk through the cities around me searching for beautiful oddities. ( )

Longtime New York Times contributor John Freeman Gill’s first novel, The Gargoyle Hunters, falls in the category of the New York novel, the city on some level not just setting but character. In this instance, that character is portrayed largely through its buildings—the architecture that seems at once to be the city’s spine and muscle, skin and limbs; an unlikely web of iron and stone through which the narrator, Griffin, recalls his youth. This metaphor, and its juxtaposition of human and artificial, will become central to the book.

On the most basic level, Griffin’s thirteen-year old self seeks to connect with his divorcing parents, particularly his father who now interacts with Griffin, his mother, and sister as little more than a cranky landlord. The only way for Griffin to bridge the emotional distance seems his father’s work as an antique restorer and dealer, a profession which has become something like an obsession, a fixation on the glory of the city’s past.

In turns quirky and cunning, naïve and knowing, achingly sad and subtly comic Gill conjures visuals that will fill your mind and family drama that will haunt you, a combination that leaves you longing to experience Griffin’s lost New York. This is a mystery about the ways in which infatuation with artifice can become such an obsession that we stop caring about things like love and family, ways in which if we’re not careful, we can become more like the stone artifacts Griffin and his father hunt than human beings.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/kbaumeister/2017/05/the-nervous-breakdowns-re... ( )