Life Among Giants
Bill Roorbach, 2012
Algonquin Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616203245
Summary
At seventeen, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone.
Sylphide, the world’s greatest ballerina, lives across the pond from their Connecticut home, in a mansion the size of a museum, and it turns out that her rock star husband’s own disasters have intersected with Lizard’s—and Kate’s—in the most intimate and surprising ways.
Over the decades that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with uncovering the motives behind the deaths, returning time and again to their father’s missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard’s and Kate’s lives much more deeply than either had ever realized.
From the football fields of Princeton to a stint with the NFL, from elaborate dances at the mansion to the seductions lying in wait for Lizard, and ultimately to the upscale restaurant he opens in his hometown, it only takes Lizard a lifetime to piece it all together.
A wildly entertaining novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, in expansiveness of character, and in lavishness of setting—it’s a Gatsby-esque adventure, a larger-than-life quest for answers that reveals how sometimes the greatest mystery lies in knowing one’s own heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August, 1953
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—New Cannan, Connecticut
• Education—B.A., Ithaca College; M.F.A, Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Maine
Bill Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. His recent novels include Life Among Giants (2012) and The Remedy for Love (2014). Roorbach and his wife, painter Juliet Karelsen, live in Maine. They have a daughter.
Background
Bill Roorbach was born in Chicago, Illinois. The next year his family moved to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended kindergarten, and in 1959 moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where he attended public schools from first grade on, graduating from New Canaan High School in 1971. In 1976, he received his B.A. (cum laude) from Ithaca College.
During what he has called his "writing apprenticeship," Roorbach traveled and worked a series of different jobs. He played piano and sang in a succession of bands, bartended, worked briefly on a cattle ranch, and worked extensively as a carpenter, plumber, and handyman. In January, 1987, he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts Writing Program of the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts, where he was awarded a School of the Arts Fellowship, a Fellowship of Distinction and an English Department teaching assistantship. In addition, he was a fiction editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. He graduated in May 1990.
Soon after he published his first book, Summers with Juliet.
Teaching
Roorbach taught at the University of Maine at Farmington from 1991 to 1995 and subsequently at the Ohio State University from 1995 to 2001, winning tenure in 1998. In 2001, he quit his tenured position and returned with his family to Maine where he taught odd semesters as visiting full professor at Colby College.
He wrote full-time until Fall, 2004, when he was awarded the William H.P. Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position as full professor. He commuted from Maine to Worcester until April, 2009, when he returned to full-time writing.
Works
Roorbach sold his first book, Summers with Juliet shortly after graduating from Columbia. In 1998, he published Writing Life Stories. During the interim, he published short work, both fiction and nonfiction, in a number of magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Playboy, Missouri Review, and Granta,
His first novel, The Smallest Color; a collection of stories, Big Bend; and a collection of essays, Into Woods, written incrementally during the preceding decade, were published in a flurry in 2000 and 2001. Big Bend was featured on the NPR program Selected Shorts, performed by the actor James Cromwell. Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth, a widely used anthology, was published in 2002. A Place on Water, which Roorbach wrote with poet Wesley McNair and essayist Robert Kimber, was published in 2004. In 2005, Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey was published. Roorbach based on an article of the same name he wrote for Harper’s Magazine. More recently, he published two novels, Life Among Giants in 2012 and The Remedy for Love in 2014.
Awards
2001 - Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
1999 - National Endowment for the Arts Fellow
2002 - O. Henry Prize
2004 - Kaplan Foundation Fellow
2006 - Maine Prize for Literary Nonfiction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrived 10/14/2014.)
Book Reviews
Life Among Giants is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they’re tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It’s a dizzy romp. There’s murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all.
Haley Tanner - New York Times Book Review
Life Among Giants, is a bighearted, big-boned story about a young man's entanglement with celebrities. Without a hint of satire, it offers a savvy reflection on America's conflicted relationship to fame: beguiled one minute, horrified the next; desperate to touch the Beautiful People, but just as eager to rebuke them…Roorbach is a humane and entertaining storyteller with a smooth, graceful style.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Consistently surprising and truly entertaining...Part thriller, part family drama, Life Among Giants is deliciously strange and deeply affecting.
Boston Globe
What lingers after finishing Life Among Giants is the beauty of Roorbach’s appreciation of his characters’ exceptional physical abilities, as they play football, cook, make love and dance.
Dallas Morning News
Besides being a compelling mystery, the kind to keep one reading well after bedtime, and a novel that almost insists on being immediately reread, Life Among Giants is a reminder of the ways we all shape our lives into stories, and the ways those stories, in turn, shape us.
Columbus Dispatch
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.... 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.
Publishers Weekly
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.... 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
Library Journal
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 characters,
Booklist
With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow...a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book.... 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.... The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.
Kirkus Reviews
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