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Alternative Atlanta
by Marshall Boswell
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback (2006-03-28)
ISBN: 0385338643
EAN: 9780385338646
Dewey Decimal #: 813
Binding/Media: Paperback - 336 pages
Release Date: 2006-03-28
SKU: 00-0TZ5-0FG4
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Softcover with no creases. Binding is tight. Pages are unmarked. No torn or bent pages.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
In a funny, poignant, wonderfully original debut novel, the author of the acclaimed short-story collection Trouble with Girls weaves a beguiling tale of fathers and sons, sons and lovers…and one unforgettable summer in a young man’s life–somewhere between a past he doesn’t understand and a future he’s not ready to live….
ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA
For thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman, life in Atlanta in the year 1996–the summer of the Olympics–doesn’t feel half bad. Writing reviews of basement rock bands for an alternative paper, Gerald has carefully avoided getting a real job, while watching his old friends from grad school start careers, marriages, and affairs–often with each other. But in this one life-changing summer, something is about to happen that will shake Gerald out of his complacency forever.
Gerald’s father, his brilliant, vagabond, and utterly unhelpful father, wants to come and stay with him “for a while.” Ever since childhood, Gerald has tried to bury his relationship with his father under a life of carefully crafted wrong turns. And now Paul Brinkman has shown up with trash bags full of belongings, a medical crisis, and an unbearable confession to make. But Gerald knows one thing for sure: He doesn’t want to hear it. Try as he might to stop it, the future is bearing down on him. A job is being dangled in New York. A secret from his past is waiting to be revealed. An ex-girlfriend is suddenly sending mixed signals. And in one moment in one summer in the city of Atlanta, everything is about to change forever. When it does, Gerald is going to have a whole new vision of who he is, who his father and friends are, and what he must do next.
An exhilarating and touching novel about family and flirtations, growing up and letting go, Alternative Atlanta brilliantly captures a time of life when everything seems possible and impossible at the same time. It is a work of dazzling storytelling from a writer of immense gifts.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
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Lives in disarray (3.25*s)
Rating  (3)
Date: 2009-03-26
Thirty-year-old Gerald Brinkman seems about as ready for life as Atlanta was for the Olympics: a certain amount of hope and promise early on that masked their lack of preparedness for coping with realities. Set in the Olympic summer of 1996 in Atlanta, Brinkman for the last three years, after dropping out of grad school as a lit major, has been drifting on pot smoking and writing about local rock bands for the local alternative newspaper, based on the actual Creative Loafing. But even this tentative and minimal existence is now being assailed as his long-standoffish father has arrived on the steps of his apartment with apparently all of his worldly possessions in a few bags and his ex-girlfriend and fellow grad student Nora is suddenly getting married.
The book follows Gerald as he lurches from one unsettled aspect of his life to another. His aloof, quirky, and intellectual father has arrived seemingly intent on unburdening himself with deeply held secrets, but Gerald can't get past his father's withdrawal from real parenting after his mother's death many years ago. Gerald's knowledge of rock music is encyclopedic and has even placed him in demand for a job in New York, yet his lack of enthusiasm is quite noticeable. Any conclusiveness that Nora's marriage could have represented is quickly dispelled as she seeks out Gerald for troubles that begin almost immediately in her marriage. And then there is mutual friend Sasha, a married beauty, who has taken a very keen interest in Gerald.
This book is the anti- perfect childhood, straight through grad school by age twenty-four, and on to a great job book. Not to minimize the difficulties of figuring out what life is all about before one is thirty, these characters, especially Gerald, given their intellectual capabilities, seem overly obtuse, self-destructive, and unable to effectively communicate - Gerald can write but not speak effectively. Most interactions seem to end up in squabbling, followed by a disappearing act. The characters are sympathetic, which keeps the book interesting, but puzzling enough to not be totally believable. At times the misconnections threaten the flow of the book.
Residents and visitors to Atlanta will undoubtedly be taken by the accurate descriptions of the Atlanta landscape: the Philly cheese steak shack on Monroe, Piedmont Park, and Centennial Park - the site of the infamous bombing. The author unnecessarily integrates the practically hysterical search for suspects in the bombing into his story. Given the turmoil and uncertainty in the city and in the lives of the characters, the book ends on a rather pacific, almost predictable, note. A lot of issues disappeared or got better quickly.
Note: One suspects that selected readers were sent early copies of the book. All the reviews just after publication were five stars. Hopefully, early reviewers can resist the pressure to inflate reviews. A nice book, but five stars is a reach.
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Wonderful Novel
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-08-31
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Alternative Atlanta is a superbly written novel about strained relationships--strained relationships with one's parents, friends, employers, lovers, ex-lovers, and the city (in this case, Atlanta during the '96 Olympics). It opens with thirty-year old Gerald Brinkman, a graduate school drop-out and local music critic, attending his ex-girlfriend's wedding. Yes, he still has feelings for her, and this wedding is just the first of many difficult trials he finds himself enduring over the next two weeks, including a surprise visit from his widowed father, a job interview in New York, and the news that his newly-married ex-love is several weeks pregnant. The plot's so gripping that, by the last 100 pages, I found myself fighting a compulsion to leaf through the book's final chapters so I wouldn't have to wait to find out what happens next: What is this deep, dark secret his dad's hiding? Who's really the father of the ex-girlfriend's baby? How will the bombing in Centennial Park inevitably factor in? But what kept me from skipping ahead is the quality of the prose. As a former Atlantan myself, I loved all the references to actual street names and local venues that only residents would be familiar with. More importantly, author Marshall Boswell's descriptions of human behavior and relationships are so perceptive and uniquely clever, I didn't want to miss a single word. You won't either.
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Lad Lit that Doesn't Make you Vomit
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-04-24
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I just read an article about the latest trend in hapless young hero lit, and apparently the trend is to write about an unabashed cad,[...] and--oh! Make sure it's not fiction, make sure you're just glorifying your own heinous existence, you handsome memoir-writing rouge, you.
Ugh. Thankfully rather than clutching an air sickness bag, I stumbled upon ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA, a terrific novel about a hapless guy finding thirty to be his "awkward age" with nothing but bad timing and good music to keep him company. "You had your chance, Gerald Brinkman, and you missed it!" he's told early in life and that continues to be his theme: missing work, missing cues, missing his ex, terrified of adulthood despite the fact his friends are dropping out of slackerdom and into Crate and Barrel faster than you can say "I Do." I liked so many things about this novel: sharp, original writing, hilarious scenes, memorable characters--not to mention that it's the first recent novel about THIS city, Atlanta, that I think gets it just right. Yet I guess the thing I like most about it is that Gerald Brinkman seems so darn familiar. The author, Marshall Boswell, writes like some of the guys I've known over the years might write if they could put their particular brand of angst down on paper. ALTERNATIVE ATLANTA is no macho brag-a-thon, just a particular, peculiarly sweet and smartly-written story of a guy and his Dad and his friends, and a summer where he finally learns to pay attention. Boswell doesn't make you want to lead the life in his book, but he sure as hell makes you wish you'd written it.
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Dr. Boswell should perform "Cool It Down" by VU at Rites of Spring this year
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-10-19
0 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
It'd be the music listening experience of our era.
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Entertaining yes. Far from great.
Rating  (2)
Date: 2005-03-19
3 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
Yes I enjoyed this book. Yes it was funny. Yes it was different. It also happened to be wordy, boring if you're not familiar with the Atlanta area, and so predictible. It is in no way great or 5 star material. It's a got-it-from-a-friend, out- of-other-books read.
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