Now You See Him

Eli Gottlieb's beautifully crafted story of a man's reflections about his best friend's death and the repercussions it has on his marriage is a compelling read. With his entire small town reeling from the murder suicide of his closest childhood friend, who had successfully fled the grasp of Monarch life, Nick Framingham begins a sometimes self indulgent but always incisive evaluation of the events in his life that lead him to his faltering marriage and strained family relationships. Gottlieb's incredibly accurate assessment of the facets of ones relationships with those he loves adds immensely to the thought provoking story of a life gone horribly wrong and its effect on those left to sort out the reasons. It is Gottlieb's ability deftly unfold to the reader his character's inner most feelings that drives this suspenseful and riveting story. I highly recommend this book!!

I'll be the first to admit that reading a story about how a small-town hero's suicide affects a community, various relationships and a marriage can be a bit of a downer. In almost every case, the impact is more than bad. However as you delve farther into this book by Eli Gottlieb, you get hooked in by the clever writing and you begin to root for a few characters whose lives have been impacted by the suicide. Finally, near the end there are a number of plot twists that I won't reveal and that I didn't expect. Overall, I can't say that I enjoyed the actual story, but I was impressed by how it was written and how it captured my attention.

I just finished a marathon read of "Now You see Him" read over 20 hours and I think Ann Patchett nailed the essence of why this is a great novel. The language is poetic but the plot is also original, full of concealments and revealments and because it is 7 AM I'm still too inside this story (and now tired, of course) to write a review that does this book justice. I do read a book a day, most days, or rather nights and after many months only a few really stay with me. This is a keeper! I think those who did not love it, maybe did not love the literary aspects which for me were almost as thrilling, or make that YES as thrilling as the amazing tale that is told her. Five stars. Excellent. Kol Ha Kovod to Eli Gottleib!

After reading "Now You See Him", I was left with the lingering feeling of having been in the company of an intriguing mysterious character who revealed himself only slowly to us, in a series of spontaneous candid moments. He did so while confessing the discomfort created by discovering the truth of his own identity and the root cause of his alienation (quite justified, as it turns out). Beyond the hip thriller-like tension this book imparts, it uses elegant, sharp, brilliant writing to dig deep into the soul of the main character, Nick Framingham, and thus into our own souls as readers. Framingham reminds me of the nice reliable friend standing on the side of the group photo, who turns out to be not so nice and not so reliable. But he's only one of many indelible, vividly sketched characters in this book. I want to spend a few words on another of these, who struck me. Shirley Castor is a grand disturbed lady who to my mind evokes the great female personae of 1940s Hollywood cinema, ala Greta Garbo or Ava Gardner. She is a concentrate of pure strong femininity, a she-warrior drunkard ready to bury you and your soul with a flicker of her expensive Cuban cigarillo, right before dousing it in her Martini glass. "Now You See Him" was a bonanza of page-turning surprises, and when I was done with it, I was left wanting more.

Eli Gottlieb's first novel, "The Boy Who Went Away," won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the McKitterick Prize of the British Society of Authors. There has been eager anticipation for his second novel, so I was pleased that I was selected to receive an Advanced Reader's Edition for review. "Now You See Him" is a literary, psychological, and moral tour-de-force. Once again, the author delights us with prose that is subtle, lush, fresh, and powerful, but it is the strong moral undercurrent of this novel that will carry you away. It took courage to write and publish this novel! This is a dark, brooding piece that provokes the reader to argue for and against each side of a number of highly questionable moral acts. What's more, the novel begs readers to empathize with deeply flawed characters. These are normal well-meaning people who nonetheless commit appalling acts of everyday and criminal moral trespass. Many readers may simply be turned off by the whole moody, slow, introspective, tenor of the work. But those who relish moral fiction will be stimulated and meaningfully challenged. Gottlieb gives us a set of characters stripped to their raw authenticity. He artfully makes us aware of each character's self-delusions. We get to see how these delusions resonate through the lives of friends and family. We witness the irony of characters so wrapped up in their own take on reality that they are blind to their misdeeds and how they mirror the very crimes they rail against in others. These are families with secrets, abundant sorrow, and emotional violence at their core. The plot starts off with a media circus in Monarch, New York, the hometown of famous Manhattan writer, Rob Castor. The media are drawn to this rural upstate New York location because Rob murders his girlfriend in Manhattan and then commits suicide in Monarch. But the novel is not about Rob Castor. The story is told entirely from the point of view of Nick Farmington, Rob's boyhood best friend. Based on court transcripts, we learn the details of Rob's crime of passion, but it is Nick's life that is the real focus of this book. On the positive side, Nick likes to think of himself as a cultured man who married the girl of his dreams, had two lovely boys, and was lucky enough to find a steady academic managerial position in his hometown. On the negative side, Nick's life has been on a steep downward spiral for many years. The book opens six months after Rob's murder-suicide, when Nick's life spirals out of control and hits rock bottom. Nick thinks: "I felt myself increasingly becalmed in life. It was as if I were on the receiving end of some mysterious large process, and singled out for special attention. 'The world knew,' I told myself. The world knew what I'd done and the world was taking action. And part of that action was to make sure that it--the world--perforated me so violently with its sights and sounds that I was paralyzed out of sheer nervou