The Astral

by Kate Christensen
Doubleday, 320 pp., $25.95

Family drama has been fodder for narrative since Grendel’s mother exploded with bloody, maternal rage. What Kate Christensen’s The Astral lacks in bloodshed it makes up for in relentless modernity. All of the contemporary family elements are accounted for. Mixed-race New York couple on the verge of divorce? Lesbian daughter? Ne’er-do-well cum cult leader son? Check, check, and check. But despite this kaleidoscope of blood-bound characters, they all read like shallow portraits of Brooklyn past and present.

Take for instance the first-person protagonist, Harry, who longs for the days he lived as the witty but bumbling and cowed husband to Luz before their separation. Harry spends the majority of the novel obsessing over his estranged wife instead of shedding his version of Catholic guilt and trying to get his groove back. The rest of the dramatis personae strike equally flat stances with few moving beyond the mental state with which they are introduced to the reader. This sense of flimsiness permeates The Astral.

While the narrator claims that “People were the landscape of the city,” there are also the myriad bars, flophouses, and even the titular apartment building weighing heavily on the proceedings. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for a novel that strives to be very “now,” the characters and events feel a bit stale, from the Dumpster-diving freegan daughter to the bevy of hipsters that litter Harry’s path to even the tilt-shift photography on the cover.

Christensen crafts a mean metaphor, but just as often her comparisons read like newly invented clichés; the description of stairs as “creaky and fragile as an osteoporotic grandmother’s spine” screams for a stronger editorial hand.

The juicy moments glossed over between the book’s three sections and the short shrift given to other telling events leave a portion of the book feeling like filler. Upon reaching the final pages of The Astral, one wonders where the drama went in this family drama.

This article appears in June 24 • 2011.

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James graduated from Columbia University in 2000 and moved to Austin a year later. Ever since, he has followed the arts and video game scene in ATX, editing and writing stories for the Chronicle along the way. Over his more than 20 years with the paper he has climbed the "corporate" ladder from lowly intern to managing editor.