Fireworks

I read this book in one day. What a wonderful, sad little man who you can't help but love. A great book. Can't wait for this author to write another. Loved it!!

In a time when so many novels from relatively young women seem to be about relatively young women, Fireworks is truly refreshing. It is, in fact, easy to forget that you are reading a work of fiction at all, as Winthrop makes Hollis Clayton come to life, never once straying from the unabashedly troubled man. We see Hollis's world through Hollis's eyes, and this is all for the best. He is a man that we can likely see some of ourselves in, yet at the same time he is a truly unique character with an interesting and eccentric mind that leads him into sorts of adventures: rowing to a beach barbecue that he had not planned on attending, early-morning birdwatching with a nightmare of a neighbor, and forming a nightly ritual of burritos and Jack Daniels with a stray dog. Yet these are not just a series of meaningless scenes, they are all an integral part of Hollis figuring his life out, be it the difference between a story and a non-story, how to deal with his absent wife after their son's death, and the unexpected things that people have in common. This is a novel to be read over and over again and kept on that shelf of "favorite books."

Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop's first novel is a remarkable book. Far from the proverbial autobiographical novel, this is a narrative tightly focused on a single character, who (apparentlly) could not be more different from the young author. And yet Ms. Winthrop gets it astonishingly right: her protagonist, Hollis, is imbued with vivid vitality. His odyseey, at once ordinary and heartbreaking, compels your attention until the very last page. I am already looking forward to Ms. Winthrop's next!

My ideal scenario when I pick up a new novel: I want to be captivated and sucked in by the first sentence. I want to immediately be able to form a little mental environment that allowes me to stage the novel in my head as I read it. I want to try as hard as possible to read slowly towards the end of the book because finishing it is like leaving summer camp at the end of the summer of my first kiss. It is rare that I find a book that satisfies my demands--and I find that I start and never finish more than half of the ones I buy. Fireworks pulled me in the minute I began to read, I finished it way too quickly, and I now find myself quite homesick for Hollis, my vicarious companion, and with a penchant for Jack Daniels. I look forward to more of Ms. Winthrop's books--she would be a perfect addition my list of serial favorites (George Saunders, Richard Russo, Alice Sebold, Michael Chabon, Charles Baxter, Dan Chaon). SUCH a great read.

Gustave Flaubert famously proclaimed his intention to write a novel "about nothing," heralding a new type of literature where plot was subservient to character, and where life's small and telling details were fully explored and expressed. Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop's very fine debut novel traces its lineage to that esthetic. She has created, seemingly effortlessly, a masterly portrait of a flawed soul whose struggle with one large event and the quotidian drama of many small events is compelling, moving, and darkly comic. In our (American) literary world teeming with excrutiatingly poorly written, plot-driven potboilers, her effort to return to the true center of the novel, character, using a limpid and understated literary style deserves to be recognized for what it is: a truly notable achievement. Her book mixes dark currents of subdued anguish with a very fine light touch that views the absurdity of modern existence through a bittersweet, slightly colored haze. It is sweetly and softly readable, and it is memorable.