Grievous In Greenpoint
KATE CHRISTENSEN’S MOST recent novel consists of philosophic insight, technical proficiency and narrative vigor wrapped around a rather undistinguished core. The Astral’s rich mixture of intelligence, wit, sophisticated prose and imaginative metaphors almost succeeds in obscuring the story’s lack of originality. For although Christensen’s writing talents are on full display, they have been employed in the service of a common and prosaic subject: a relationship gone bust. That this disappointing fact only rarely mires her tale in tedium is a testament to Christensen’s literary talent, but upon reading The Astral, one may well feel a bit cheated, given the realization that the author has basically colored and magnified different parts of a single, very small circle.
The narrator and protagonist of The Astral is Harry Quirk, a middling poet and sometime teacher in his late fifties. For Quirk, composing poems is not merely a vocation, but a way to live a fuller life. "Writing was the only place I had ever found where my two disparate selves could coexist," he muses, "where I was afforded the illusion of being integrated, where the part of me that wanted to be a good, decent, responsible man and the part of me that was hell-bent on selfish immersion in mindless animal pleasures met and shimmered in dissonant grace together on the page."
Unfortunately, it is precisely this sort of writing that got Harry kicked out of his apartment by his wife, Luz. (The Astral opens with Harry living in a flophouse, jobless and wandering around Brooklyn.) When Luz read his latest poems, addressed to imaginary lovers, she concluded that Harry was having an affair with his best friend, Marion, a woman she never liked. "Luz has a cold, impeccable exterior inside which beats a soul as fragile and silken and easily crushed as a baby mouse," observes Harry. "Her exterior defends her interior with hawk-talon rabidity." Indeed, the story begins shortly after Luz has destroyed Harry’s poetry notebooks and computer, and banished him from their apartment in Franklin Street’s Astral building, something of a Greenpoint landmark.
California-born Christensen (whose novel The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award) has done time in Brooklyn, and she makes extensive use of the borough’s geography. Much of the action, such as it is (dejected Harry isn’t exactly the active type), occurs in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Indeed, the Astral is "an enormous, six-story redbrick tenement castle-fortress that span[s] a whole block of Franklin between India and Java." Following his stint in a Manhattan Avenue flophouse, Harry manages to move back into the Astral—this time into a tiny apartment—where he might continue his efforts to remonstrate with the implacable Luz. And thanks to a Hasidic Jewish friend, he gets a job in the accounts payable department of a lumber company in Williamsburg operated by Hasids.
Harry proves likable enough, though obviously (and understandably) selfabsorbed. His interaction with his daughter Karina and several of his friends allows Christensen to observe the foibles of other characters and explore their convoluted romantic relationships. This provides some respite from the story’s incessant focus on Harry and Luz.
Christensen also delves into the life of Harry’s son Hector, who has joined a religious cult on Long Island. This subplot feels more than a bit incongruous, but sustains interest nonetheless, and even gives Harry the chance to make a tenuous but hilarious comparison between the mind-control cult members are subjected to and the "one-woman fascistic government" he had to contend with. Indeed, it even helps him begin to move beyond Luz.
Ultimately, a failed romantic relationship makes for a subject at once complex and banal. The labyrinthine intricacies of any long-standing marriage that ends in separation and acrimony could easily take up hundreds of pages of a novel without ever appearing forced or contrived. Moreover, no need for filler material would arise; if anything, the author would have to be careful to keep the novel from becoming overlong and unwieldy. (Christensen manages this admirably; her story rarely drags.) The problem lies with the subject matter’s lack of uniqueness—even in its details. The Astral exemplifies this phenomenon; Christensen has written an engaging if uninspired novel, filled with pathos and charm, about one man’s typical emotional upheavals as he grapples with his crumbling marriage.