Alternative Atlanta

by Marshall Boswell

Book Overview

Boswell's debut story collection, Trouble with Girls, received rave reviews from coast to coast. Now he returns with his debut novel, a smart, provocative, and witty story of a young man who feels out... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038533852X
• ISBN13: 9780385338523
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Length: 325 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful Novel

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.

This Novel Rocks

Boswell has written one of the funniest, most touching novels I've read in a long time. His portrait of s father who moves in with his slacker son is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Check out his first book too while you're at it, a collection of stories called TROUBLE WITH GIRLS.

Funny, poignant & a great read

Gerald, a pot-smoking former grad student, now a music reviewer for an alternative newspaper, gets tangled up with a dying father and an old girlfriend who just got married but still hasn't gotten over him. I really liked Marshall Boswell's Trouble With Girls, but didn't find it quite as impressive as other story collections about young men searching for love -- like Steve Almond's My Life in Heavy Metal or Thomas Beller's The Sleep-Over Artist. But with this novel, Marshall Boswell really hits it out of the park. It's a great story with compelling characters -- Nora, the old-flame; the father who make a suprise visit to Gerald in the midst of the Atlanta Olympic games. The father has two big pieces of information it takes him a while to tell. (I won't say won't they are -- discovering them is part of the fun suspense of the book.) Meanwile, the old girlfiend has a couple big secrets of her own. Watching Gerald sort this all out is moving and very funny. The writing is fabulous and the turns of phrases and observations are often brilliantly insightful. I recommend this book to anyone, and I was glad to see in the acknowledgements section that Boswell thanked two writers who I really admire: the aforementioned Steve Almond, and also Robert Cohen, whose two most recent novels -- Inspired Sleep and The Here and Now -- I would recommend to anyone who enjoyed Alternative Atlanta.

A FINE NOVEL: Smart and savvy.

As a woman, what I really liked most about this book was the character of Nora, who is a remarkably real and complex character. She is emotionally anxious and yet empowered, both vulnerable and strong in her femininity: a balance hard for most writers to achieve, particularly when that writer is male. Yet Boswell manages--within a story of the slow but constant ache of a grown-up boy's very "pre" midlife crisis--to create a woman who deserves our identification and our respect. Nora's counterpart, that grown-up boy, Gerald, is equally compelling in his worried want to be a good son and yet to find his own way. Boswell's portrayal of that "what-am-I-doing-with-my-life" torture we all face somewhere near our 30th year is dead on. Sometimes painfully so. But the angst is relative, and Boswell's prose throughout the book, especially his description of the vast and dazzling chaos that was Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, makes us see the beauty in desolation.

NOT JUST A GREAT FIRST NOVEL: A GREAT NOVEL

Like his excellent collection of short stories, Alternative Atlanta reveals Boswell to be observant, insightful, and wise to the imperfect ways we love and learn and lose and, again and again and again, try to achieve some sensible direction in a frequently inscrutable world. There are so many ways in which this novel--a debut effort!--achieves greatness: the hit-the-nail-on-the-head portrayal of contemporary music (and music criticism); the brilliant evocation of chaotic, Olympic-obsessed Atlanta; the keenly rendered angst and ennui of the protagonist, Gerald, lost in that early thirty-something morass of directionless desire for something (Something stable? Something "deeper"? Something intellectual? Something just around the next corner?); and, of course, the love-of-language brilliance with which Boswell constructs sentences that give nothing short of delight.