Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb

From the Publisher

His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you've heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his early twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid upstate New York town. About a dozen years later, he murdered his writer-girlfriend and committed suicide. . . .

The deaths of Rob Castor and his girlfriend begin a wrenching and enthrallingly suspenseful story that mines the explosive terrains of love and paternity, marriage and its delicate intricacies, family secrets and how they fester over time, and ultimately the true nature of loyalty and trust, friendship and envy, deception and manipulation.

As the media takes hold of this sensational crime, a series of unexpected revelations unleashes hidden truths in the lives of those closest to Rob. At the center of this driving narrative is Rob's childhood best friend, Nick Framingham, whose ten-year marriage to his college sweetheart is faltering. Shocked by Rob's death, Nick begins to reevaluate his own life and his past, and as he does so, a fault line opens up beneath him, leading him all the way to the novel's startling conclusion.

In this ambitious and thrilling novel, award-winning author Eli Gottlieb—with extraordinarily luxuriant and evocative prose—takes us deep into the human psyche, where the most profound of secrets are kept.

The New York Times - Danielle Trussoni

Despite Nick's flaws, he succeeds in placing the intensity of male friendship at the heart of his story. The grief he and the other roadies feel is moving, as is his continuing loyalty to his dead friend. The reader's interest is snared and held by Nick's refusal to forget Rob's troubled life, his persistence in wondering how his friend could be driven to such violence…Nick doesn't answer the most interesting questions about Rob. What he does do, though—and remarkably well—is present a heartfelt picture of enduring friendship and inconsolable, debilitating grief, even if that grief is complicated by jaw-dropping revelations as the novel draws to a close.

Publishers Weekly

A mesmerizing blend of suspense and long-buried family secrets, Gottlieb's second novel (after 1997's The Boy Who Went Away) culminates in shocking revelations that rock a quiet upstate New York town. Nick Framingham is still reeling from the recent death of his childhood best friend, the writer Rob Castor, who committed suicide after killing his ex-girlfriend in Manhattan. Nick's own marriage to his college sweetheart, Lucy, begins to unravel as he struggles to understand what drove Rob to murder. Rekindling an old relationship with his first love, Belinda, Rob's volatile and beautiful sister, Nick begins to retrace not only Rob's last days but also their shared childhood, looking for clues to explain his friend's actions. Gottlieb skillfully ratchets up the suspense by doling out the details of Rob's death in bits and pieces, until everything falls into place in a startling conclusion that will rattle even the genre's most experienced readers. With his pitch-perfect dialogue and flawed yet empathetic characters, Gottlieb's sophomore effort should win him widespread recognition. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

A midlife crisis in upstate New York. For plump, balding, 30-something Nick Framingham, with his "teetering marriage and dead-end job," things really start to unravel after his childhood friend Rob Castor, a successful but blocked writer, murders his girlfriend Kate, then commits suicide. Nick, the narrator of Gottlieb's second novel (The Boy Who Went Away, 1996) is a man of seemingly limited appeal-a self-proclaimed dork at school; distant with his wife Lucy and two sons; and out of touch with his emotionally cool parents, who seemed to love his brother (killed in a car crash) more. Now, despite Lucy's increasingly pointed warnings that their marriage is at risk, he seems happy to commit adultery with his old flame, Rob's sexpot sister, when she returns to Monarch, the small town where they all grew up. While drifting further from Lucy (whom he claims to love) and his children (whom he accuses Lucy of wooing away from him), Nick talks to his own aging parents, then Rob's poisonous mother, whose suggestion that he is illegitimate might explain his parents' lesser love for him. Two secrets are finally exposed, one which causes Nick to redefine himself, the other intended to explain his emotional torpor-although neither halts his downward slide. Sensational revelations arrive too late to enliven a smoothly written but sluggish and morose tale.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0061284645
  
• ISBN-13: 9780061284649
• Format: Hardcover, 272pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: January 2008
• Sales Rank: 41,525

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

At this late date, would it be fair to say that people, after a fashion, have come to doubt the building blocks of life itself? That we suspect our food? That we fear our children? And that as a result we live individually today atop pyramids of defensive irony, squinched into the tiny pointed place on the top and looking balefully out at the landscape below? In such a time of dark views and darker diagnoses, I'll forestall all second-guessing and declare it up front: I loved him. I'd grown up across the street from him. In my own way, I worshipped him. With the slavish adoration of a child, I'd tried briefly to be him. Although we were both boys the same age and although we chaffed and teased each other constantly, below it all ran an awareness on my part that there was always something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply drawn about him that set him apart from the rest of us.

His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you've heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his mid­twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid sleepy upstate New York town. Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide, causing the hot lights of the media to come on with an audible whoosh, and stay there, focused on his life, the town of his birth and, by default, we his friends and neighbors. In truth, it was fascinating, in a somewhat repulsive way, to watch how a lone wire­service story spilled outward, and the newsweeklies picked it up, and then, when it hit television, everything exploded in a bright and twinkling cloud of coverage. Inthe control rooms of America, apparently, they'd made the collective decision: this is the one. So within six days of the event, TV people were driving up from Manhattan and bivouacking in the Dorset Hotel, along with the big trucks with their sleek antennas and dishes, the over-made-up on-camera host women and anchormen looking all of them like something struck from the Stone Phillips mold and oozing a special kind of major-market insincerity.

For those of us who were his friends, even if we hadn't been in touch with him much these last years, there was the inevitable shock, followed by the inevitable (in my case) sorrow. For the rest of us in town, it was more about the transforming wave that ran through us on the heels of the media attention: that hot bolt of change that left us keenly aware of the way our bodies and faces might look in the rare air of television. By default, it seemed, we'd all become actors on a reality show dedicated to showing the rotten underbelly of innocent American small-town life. Except there was no rotten underbelly. This wasn't Columbine High School. This wasn't that sandy sad place where poor David Koresh preached and died. This was Monarch, New York, a trim, proud little town on a hill far enough away from the major urban centers that people still pause a second to consider before they speak.

But no matter. The weather was turning crisp, the apples had already swelled, reddened, and fallen from the trees, and suddenly too many of us were outside braving the cold while wandering the streets of the town in pretend idleness, hoping to be on the nightly news. It was undignified to see Major Wilkinson, our World War II vet and a man rumored to have squirreled away millions in silver coins, buying a whole new wardrobe (at eighty-five years of age!) and posing in a photo op each morning at the entrance to the Krispy Kreme like a Wal-Mart greeter gone mad. Old diaries and dusty storage boxes were ransacked for sellable artifacts, and there was a kind of unspoken lottery that was won by Hilary Margold, who unearthed a tattered browning piece of paper with Rob's unmistakable high school penmanship forming the words "question authority." It was authenticated, publicized in the local press, and in tribute to the perennial American hunger for morbid memorabilia, ended up on eBay, where it went for a pretty sum. All of us, whether we'd known Rob personally or not, walked around with a strange lifted feeling, like a freshening wind was blowing, and maybe that wind would bring something live and new into our lives.

For my part I participated in almost none of it. I was stunned by his death, and then doubly shocked by the extent of the pain it brought with it—a sharp piercing ache in a private place, way up inside, that hadn't been touched in years.