Recommend Gologorskys Stop Here “Unlike some of the recent works of war fiction by and about soldiers, Fobbit and Yellow Birds, for example, Gologorsky’s exploration of the suffering caused by American wars isn’t soldier-centric. Moreover, she isn’t just asking us to take notice of how Americans suffer financially, emotionally, and physically — she’s asking us to care. This is a tender book whose spare and suffering prose masks a big, bleeding heart. But what gives the book its tension, its bite, is the unresolved concern that our sympathy might not be enough.” “There’s a particularly American sort of isolation, a way of being alone while in a group, that can be seen most clearly at a twenty-four-hour diner during the thin hours of night. No squalor or violence present, just the sinister hum of neon and the clanking of coffee spoons as strangers politely sink to the bottom of their own personal hells. It’s that same rootlessness and dissatisfaction that the painter Edward Hopper mined so thoroughly. You see it of course in his most famous work, “Nighthawks,” but it’s really present in everything he ever did. It’s a consciousness of sinister despair in the angular shadows of a building. It’s in the way two people leaning towards each other in conversation seem to be engaged in an existential conspiracy. It’s how a broken aerial jutting off to the side might be a thin finger pointing towards oblivion. This isn’t necessarily realism that we’re dealing with, but a very realistic look at the way depression soaks through the American landscape. Stop Here, Beverly Gologorsky’s second novel, is a sort of literary Hopper painting. She works in a simple and very naturalistic mode that moves beyond mere realism in the same way that “Nighthawks” suggests meaning beyond the simple plot of its image. Stop Here is about average Americans who are haunted. Money, death, regret — whatever torments the characters of this novel also thickens the atmosphere with an almost spectral presence. To say that Gologorsky is a master of mood would be an understatement… full-stop.net/2013/12/03/reviews/scott-beauchamp/stop-here-beverly-gologorsky/
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:45:03 +0000
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