"The much anticipated new novel by Christopher Sorrentino, acclaimed author of National Book Award finalist Trance a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at truth and fiction, love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, chaos and free will. Sandy Mulligan, a successful writer in the midst of a personal and creative crisis, retreats from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish a novel and to escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that's maimed his public reputation. Once there, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library. But Salteau is not what he appears to be a fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter who arrives to investigate a theft from a local Indian run casino. Salteau's possible role in the crime could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Kat immediately attracts a restive Sandy. In their growing involvement with one another, each becomes a pawn in the other's game. As we weave among these characters, learning about their lives and motivations, and uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we realize that the storyteller is not the only one with secrets to conceal that all three are fugitives of one kind or another. All the Sorrentino touches that have thrilled admirers are here: sparkling dialogue, satirical wit, attention to the details of everyday life, dizzyingly inventive prose but it is the deeply imagined interior lives of its all too human main characters that set this novel apart. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. The Fugitives also is a cautionary tale of twenty-first century American life a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections with others in a contemporary world that's connected in almost every way. Darkly satirical, exuberantly enigmatic, and completely unforgettable, The Fugitives is an event that reaffirms Sorrentino's position as an American writer of the first rank"--
The idea that you'd be an entirely different person if you just lived somewhere else is one that has a lot of instinctive appeal. And trying to run from who you are by changing your location is what drives the characters of Christopher Sorrentino's The Fugitives. Sandy Mulligan leaves Brooklyn in the wake of a nasty divorce and sets up shop in Cherry City, Michigan (a very thinly disguised Traverse City) to recover and finish his long-awaited next novel. But he's got a bad case of writer's block and his most literary activity is going to the library to watch a man called John Salteau tell Native American folktales. Salteau is also what brings Chicagoan reporter Kat Danhoff back to the area she grew up in...her long-lost best friend who never left home thinks Salteau might be a mobster in disguise and Kat can't resist a juicy story that might break her out of a boring professional beat. But eventually both Sandy and Kat find out what anyone who's ever moved knows: you can't escape your problems that way, because you're still yourself wherever you go.
Which isn't to say that anyone ever stops trying it. The themes of identity and the futility of trying to run away from it are strong and immediate: Sandy is a writer who can't write, and Kat is a Native American who does her best to avoid talking about her heritage. Sorrentino presents them both at first as flawed but relatable people: Sandy had an affair, but went back to his wife and went to couple's counseling to try to put it back together even if it ultimately failed, Kat cut ties with her formative years and the people in them to escape poverty and aimlessness. But as the book progresses, the layers are pulled back and the truth is uglier than it might seem: Sandy left his wife for his mistress for a time, he's deeply unconcerned about his ex-wife and their children, he blames his former mistress's husband for their affair as much as anyone. Kat married early to an older man and treated him with cruelty, she's emotionally withholding to her current husband, she's a serial adulterer herself. It fits with the way we get to know people in real life: we're presented with the story they like to tell about themselves, but over time the deeper stuff comes to the fore. For most people the deeper stuff isn't quite that dark, but it's the same kind of idea.
It's an intriguing literary device and makes us only slowly question the reliability of our narrators. Well, narrator, because only Sandy is written in the first person, but Kat's perspective isn't written much differently despite being in the third person. We're also invited to question their reliability when Sorrentino goes back and tells a story of their interaction from the perspective of the other (which is occasionally a little confusing but you get used to pretty quick). Who's telling us the "real" version? Are either of them? The novel has a lot of merit, but it's ultimately frustrating because it felt like with more vigorous editing it could have been great. I'm generally unbothered by prose that tends toward the purple, but even I was raising my eyebrows at how often there were overwritten run-on sentences. But overall, it's an engaging character-driven read...if you enjoy books about bad people, anyways.
