Life Among Giants

September 10, 2012
An exploration of lives touched by greatness and tragedy in equal measure, Roorbach’s latest novel traces towering Princeton graduate and NFL player–cum– restaurateur David “Lizard” Hochmeyer in his attempt to unravel the tangled conspiracy behind his parents’ murder in 1970. When his parents are killed in front of him at a restaurant, David believes the culprits are connected to his neighbor, the elegant ballerina Sylphide, whose rock star husband also died under mysterious circumstances, and with whom David has fallen heedlessly in love. As David trades a career in football for one in food, his sister, Kate, a tennis star with “tough girl” endorsements, slides into paranoia over their parents’ deaths. It is a soapy and thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts, a sensory abundance that fails to mitigate the sorrows of David’s youth. This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity; David and Sylphide inhabit a galaxy of stars, each more blinding and destructive than the next, drawing intrigue and violence into their orbits. Roorbach (Big Bend) has written a mystery free of contemporary cynicism and recalling the glitter and allure of a kind of stardom that has also, in its way, been collateral damage to a greedy financial machine. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

September 1, 2012
With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's (Temple Stream, 2005, etc.) latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow. Sylphide's husband was Dabney Stryker-Stewart, an internationally famous rock star knighted for his work with children trapped in war. Add Kate, Lizard's talented tennis-playing sister; her lover and professor, Jack Cross, a famed pop-psychologist teaching at Yale; and Don Shula, legendary Miami Dolphins coach. Next come Etienne, chef extraordinaire, tattooed head to toe, and RuAngela, Etienne's five o'clock--shadowed transvestite lover. That's a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book. Lizard's father, always skating the edge of respectability and propriety, is a foot soldier in a Wall Street Gecko-type financial shell game. Lizard's mother, married beneath her station, drinks martinis and plays country-club tennis, her talent as a tournament ringer for the moneyed set assuring the family access to the right circles. The family resides next door to High Side, palatial home of Sylphide and Dabney, where teenage Kate was caretaker for Dabney's son and became Dabney's lover. Then Nick, Lizard's father, turned state's evidence and was shot dead, along with his wife, for his trouble. Great setup, sparkling characters, but one-third into the book readers will hunger for less setup and characterization and want the story to get moving. It does, in complex fashion. Kate goes bonkers after her parents' murders. Emily and Sylphide jump in and out of Lizard's bed and his charmed life--he's a backup quarterback for the Dolphins, owner of two successful, trendy restaurants--before things take a turn. Roorbach knows food; readers will want recipes of the fare he describes. The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 15, 2012

David "Lizard" Hochmeyer is a star quarterback set on Princeton until the mysterious murder of his parents. As he and sister Kate struggle to cope, they find their lives crossing with prima ballerina Sylphide and her rock star husband, who inhabit the mansion across the pond from their Connecticut home. In-house enthusiasm, big publicity, and a 12-city tour.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
David Lizard Hochmeyer is enormous, nearly seven feet tall, and so is the labyrinth of tragedy and revenge he navigates in Roorbach's novel. The high-school football star is headed to Princeton and then an NFL career when his parents are murdered. Both his and his sister's lives are irreparably shaken and become significantly intertwined with the world-famous ballerina who lives nearby. Roorbach has created a memorable narrator who possesses the disarming frankness of Holden Caulfield and whose rapid-fire delivery and cutting characterizations expertly shift between memories and the present moment. Lizard keeps this part-mystery, part-coming-of-age-tale humming, as the cavalcade of revelations rolls by, prompting the reader to echo Lizard's signature, Whoa! This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main charaters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2012

This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone--steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot. The narrator, David (Lizard) Hockmeyer, is a giant himself, a former high school football player who's almost seven feet tall. His parents were shot in front of him when he was a teen, and he and his troubled, bipolar sister Kate have been obsessed for decades with finding the killers. Lizard and Kate live in Connecticut near a celebrated Swedish ballerina who calls herself Sylphide after the classic ballet and is the widow of Dabney, a flamboyant British rocker who died in a car crash. (Improbably, Dabney is already a big star in America in the early 1960s, before the Beatles and the British invasion.) In the end, Lizard and Sylphide's lives intersect in more ways than either of them could have imagined. VERDICT This big, sprawling novel has so much going on that it's easy to lose track of the murder mystery at its heart. It would pack more of a punch if it had a sharper focus.--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.