You probably wouldn't expect the Hochmeyer kids to be anything unusual. They seemed just two more garden-variety suburban baby-boomer bedroom-community kids from Connecticut, fated to grow up to work in the financial district or as a nurse. But then life dealt them a different hand.
Meet David "Lizard" Hochmeyer, former third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, now a wildly successful restaurateur; and his sister Kate, at one time eighteenth-ranked women's tennis player in the world, now a bipolar mess. From the day English rocker Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his ballerina wife, Sylphide, moved into the mansion across the lake from the Hochmeyers' home, the siblings' lives changed forever; changed from ordinary lives to Life Among Giants.
Or maybe it didn't begin the day the dancer and Dabney moved in; maybe it began the day Dabney slammed his Mustang into a bridge abutment and died... or the day the kids' father, Nick, was hauled off to prison for white-collar crime. It most assuredly had begun by the day both Nick and Barbara Hochmeyer were shot in cold blood before David's very eyes. Yes, by then it had begun.
Orphaned in seconds at a tender seventeen, Lizard stayed the course: finished high school, football scholarship to Princeton (Kate was already playing varsity tennis at Yale), and drafted by "the Fish" in the seventh round. Though one of the ten most eligible bachelors in Miami, Lizard never fully connected with anyone - probably because he'd always been secretly in love with the dancer Sylphide.
Through four decades of a life well-lived (and sometimes well-loved) David Hochmeyer carried burned in his brain the image of the man who killed his parents before calmly walking away. "Kaiser," his father shouted as the killer strode into view - that was David's only clue. If the thought never quite left his mind, it was his sister who was obsessed; yet Kate's obsession reached farther back in time, to Dabney's death. Was there indeed some connection between those two awful days or was the only link within the fevered imagination of a damaged woman? And would David ever make all those connections he so desperately desired? Life, we will learn, is different among the giants...
Classifying Bill Roorbach's saga of the life and times of David Hochmeyer is troublesome. It's certainly a mystery, though perhaps only in the most leisurely sense. It's undeniably a bildungsroman, though Lizard takes an awfully long time to complete his transition to adulthood. There are aspects of a kitchen cozy, a romance (with a touch of "Penthouse Forum" thrown in for spice), a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous, and a history of an uncommonly common family. Throughout it all, Roorbach unabashedly sprinkles the names of giants with a liberal hand: Baryshnikov, Clapton, Page, Griese, Shula.
In the end, however, the genre of Life Among Giants doesn't mean diddly. What is significant is that Bill Roorbach manages to capture your interest from the first page and hold it to the last, through all his novel;s labyrinthine twists. A brief departure into mycology? Holds it, 'cause somehow you know it's going to be important. A Chris-Crutcheresque description of a high school football game? Moves things along nicely. Lizard's first exposure to The Dance? All part of his growth, of that will ultimately shape his life.
Some have compared Life Among Giants to "early John Irving," by which they mean The World According to Garp (apparently ignoring the three novels he'd already written; Setting Free the Bears, The 158-pound Marriage, and The Water-Method Man). In fact there are some facets of Giants that are reminiscent of Garp: the importance of sports (football, not wrestling), the functionally-challenged yet loving family, and the open-hearted acceptance of a cross-dressing character (though there are no tongueless Ellenjamesians). In actuality, I suppose, there is a resemblance between the two, for both are sweeping memoirs of one man's life spent trying to fit to a world that seems one size too small for him.
| Too, like Irving's Garp, Bill Roorbach's Lizard tells his story without embellishment, never omitting any of life's little embarrassments and foolish missteps. His style is quirkily humorous, slyly romantic, and filled with an unabashed love for his friends and his family. Life Among Giants may be sprinkled with celebrity sightings, but Lizard always draws his strength from the ordinary people around him - something those who hunger after a Kardashian lifestyle might do well to emulate. |
No comments:
Post a Comment