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EASTMAN WAS HERE

Alex Gilvarry

An ambitious new novel set in the literary world of 1970s New York, following a washed-up writer in an errant quest to pick up the pieces of his life.

The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer; finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis.

His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival dating back to his days on the Harvard literary journal, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America’s longest war. Seeing his opportunity to regain his wife’s love and admiration while reclaiming his former literary glory, he sets out for Vietnam. But instead of the return to form as a pioneering war correspondent that he had hoped for, he finds himself in Saigon, grappling with the same problems he thought he’d left back in New York.

Following his widely acclaimed debut, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, Alex Gilvarry employs the same thoughtful, yet dark sense of humor in Eastman Was Here to capture one irredeemable man’s search for meaning in the face of advancing age, fading love, and a rapidly-changing world.

Alex Gilvarry was born in Staten Island, New York in 1981. He is the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, winner of the Hornblower Award for First Fiction and Best New Voice 2012 by Bookspan, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and was selected byThe New York Timesas an Editor's Choice. He is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and has received fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center and the Norman Mailer Center. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Globe, NPR's All Things Considered, and many other publications. He is a professor at Monmouth University where he teaches fiction.

Available products
Book Published 2017-08-22 by Viking
Book Published 2017-08-22 by Viking

Comments

What if a down-but-not-dead literary lion went to war? Eastman Was Here seeks out that question and so much more. Part tribute and part throwback, it howls with dark comic energy and brings real vibrancy to two staples of the American imagination, 1970s New York and the Vietnam War. In Alex Gilvarry’s masterful hands, the character of Eastman will both delight and horrify readers, something his real-life inspirations would no doubt appreciate. This is a wild joyride of a book and one of 2017’s best novels.

Eastman Was Here is a wry throwback of a novel that, though it’s set in the past, feels relevant and new. In the tradition of satirists like John Kennedy O’Toole and Kurt Vonnegut, Alex Gilvarry sends up the “bad old days” of ’70s-era hypermasculinity and misogyny, paints a vivid picture of Saigon during the War, and introduces us to an unforgettable anti-hero: the enraging, absurd, hilarious Eastman. Despite its satirical tone, there is real heart in this book, and I found myself incredibly moved by its final act.

Eastman Was Here has it both ways, beautifully, both a hilarious send-up of certain Gen Greatest literary icons and their self-aggrandizing, self-crippling conceptions of manhood, as well as a moving tale of existential crisis. Gilvarry’s comedy is sharp, but just as impressive is the way he gives his characters a captivating richness and an ability to surprise. There is so much artistic and intellectual delight in this book, all of it suffused with real feeling.

With his second book, Gilvarry establishes himself as a writer who defies expectation, convention and categorization. Eastman Was Here is a dark, riotously funny and audacious exploration of the sacred and the profane—and pretty much everything in between.

I can’t imagine anything smarter or more exuberant than this novel. You want to smack Eastman on the head every couple of pages, but you never want to part with him!

Alex Gilvarry has not so much reimagined Norman Mailer as he has channeled him. Eastman Was Here is a wildly entertaining book, intoxicatingly written and deceptively profound in its insights into the nature of celebrity, country, marriage, war and the pitfalls of being a writer. If Mailer had lived to read this novel, he’d have been jealous.