Jon Udelson
Jon Udelson is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.
If Thomas Pynchon first novel in twelve years will be his last, we longtime readers might ask how that knowledge weighs on our reading of Shadow Ticket. And we might further wonder in what ways the novel extends or betrays the vision of an author six decades on the scene of the lone detective—one who learns that chaos has no opposite.
There is no shortage of ideas in Greetings from Asbury Park, the debut novel by Daniel H. Turtel. In under 250 pages, Turtel contends with the ways children are haunted by their parents in both life and death, the anxieties of legitimacy, the fragile but tight strands of connection that hold communities together, the echoing effects of emotional trauma and the impossibility of escaping from memory, the ongoing frustration of racism and homophobia’s existence into our present, and the taboos of incest. As I read this ambitious work, I couldn’t help but feel Turtel attempting to channel Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio.
