The Blizzard Party

Starred review from January 11, 2021
Livings, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize winner for the story collection The Dog, returns with a brilliant debut novel centering on a woman’s memories of a fatal blizzard that occurred in her childhood. Hazel Saltwater determines to rewrite the story of Albert Caldwell’s death after a party during the historic blizzard of 1978 in New York City when Hazel was six. (Her father, Erwin, has already published a blockbuster autobiographical novel about it called The Blizzard Party.) Hazel pieces together backstories of the pivotal players who attended the party, including the neurotic Erwin, transformed by guilt over a WWII experience; Caldwell, an astute lawyer plotting his suicide before succumbing to dementia; Turk Brunn, who runs an amusement park where visitors sign up to experience various forms of simulated abuse; and Turk’s father, Lazlo, a linguistic virtuoso whose research inadvertently made him psychotic. Livings’s genius resides in his ability to weave these disparate threads together through banal events (a Christmas tree jammed into an apartment’s garbage chute; the selling of a painting; a brawl in a diner), illuminating an intricate pattern that, for Hazel, predestines a dénouement that is startling to the reader. Livings calls to mind the work of Michael Chabon as he brings insight into the way events and circumstances shape his characters’ lives. This is one to savor. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners

January 1, 2021
This ambitious debut novel from PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize winner Livings features a large cast of characters all converging on, or emerging from, a single night. February 6, 1978, New York City: folks are headed to the penthouse of the grand Apelles for a wild party regardless of being in the midst of an historic blizzard. Hazel Saltwater, age six, is in the single quiet bedroom while her mother joins the party and her famous author father contemplates information he alone holds: their elderly neighbor Albert has decided to commit suicide. This night will change Hazel's life, but it will be her father who tells the story in a bestselling, if false, novel about it. Hazel looks back as an adult while dealing with the fallout from 9/11. Much of the book follows the stories of various partygoers before eventually circling back to the Saltwaters and Albert. While at times bombastic and bewildering, the novel also features moments of brilliance, especially in the dialogue and the surprising connections. A literary feast for a patient reader.

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Starred review from December 15, 2020
From acclaimed story writer Livings, a first novel that might be called a detour de force: sprawling, discursive, loose-limbed (and impressive). Our narrator is Hazel Saltwater, daughter of a renowned and prodigiously phobic writer. At 6, she was the still center in the drugged-out maelstrom of a bash held by neighbors in the Apelles, her family's grand Upper West Side apartment building, on the snowy night of Feb. 6, 1978. While watching TV in a back bedroom, Hazel made the peculiar acquaintance of Albert Caldwell, an elderly ex-lawyer who, having confirmed his descent into dementia, earlier in the evening had staged an emergency, slipped away from the hospital, and stolen and crashed a cab on his way to drown himself in the Hudson River. Albert was interrupted in this plot by Vikram, a boy--later Hazel's husband--who delivered him back home to the Apelles and, it turns out, a yet more spectacular fate. That fate became the germ of Hazel's father's most famous book, which starred a fictional version of Hazel. The book we're reading, it soon emerges, is Hazel's own four-decades-later reconstruction of that night, which she treats as a Rosetta Stone to unlock every secret and explore every connection in her life before and since--and in the lives of all those constellated around her. The book ranges with supreme confidence from its titular setting to World War II Europe, 9/11, and beyond. Livings' nearest model may be the doorstop-sized novels of Tom Wolfe...and this book is similarly digressive, maximalist, and prone to old-fashioned manipulations of sentiment. Livings may not quite have Wolfe's journalistic chops, but he's a far more skillful and empathetic novelist, and what seems moralistic and preening in Wolfe's books reads here mostly as playful and nimble, if mildly self-indulgent. One may wonder why a first-time novelist in 2020 would follow the Wolfe/Balzac template for the Novel of Everything...but the fact is that Livings, amazingly, pulls it off. An exuberant, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink pleasure.

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