an excerpt from forthcoming Klingon Confidential in the Mass. Review
Flea Circus: a brief bestiary of grief
winner AWP prize in Fiction
Grub Street Shortlist
buy this from University of Chicago Press
Pascal’s Wager and performing fleas. The Haunted Mansion of Long Branch and an old dockside bar. Raceway Park and a pristine 1971 Plymouth Road Runner. A cat named Altamont. These are all that stand between a young mathematician and madness as she attempts to make sense of her lover’s suicide. Narrow margins, you say? Not much to place between a slip of a broken-hearted Jersey Girl and the Abyss? Indeed, it is a treacherous twelve seconds on the quarter mile, hilarious and harrowing by turn. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Francine Prose
I was drawn to the sheer strangeness of the writer’s project: the lyrical, tough-talking high-low lament of a Jersey Girl who cannot, who will not, and who essentially luxuriates in her refusal to get over the suicide of her lover. A simultaneously reckless and calculated intensity permeates this novel, in which the most important event has already happened, and the narrative arc (if we can call it that) is mostly ruminative and interior. Fairly soon, we realize that the narrator is playing with language, with the alphabet, even; it’s not accidental that the epigraph is taken from Georges Bataille. But for me the real surprises were less about letters than about voice, about sentences and about the paragraphs that nearly always ended in a different place (and more interestingly) than I might have predicted.
Kirkus review
Library Journal
( November 15, 2011; 9781936970049 )
Tim Acree was a fascination — with an endearing turn of phrase and irrepressible smile and as the proud Professor of Fleas. Why, then, did he throw his life away-jumping into the airshaft between the cluttered tangle of apartments he called home? That is what is driving Izzy, the girlfriend he left behind, slowly mad. There has to be an answer somewhere amid the tangle of memories and fleas, and she is scrabbling after it with everything she has. This winner of the AWP Award Series in the Novel is an entrancing, alphabetical look at how suicide affects the survivors, and it works to make sense of all of the whys and hows that those left behind inevitably fumble through in the wake of sudden death. Izzy’s enthralling voice pulls the reader through each heartbreak and revelation. VERDICT The experience of Keifetz’s second novel (after Corrido) is less like reading a book than having a frighteningly intimate conversation over coffee. A must for fans of literary fiction.”
Booklist:
Winner of the AWP Award, Keifetz’s second novel, after Corrido (1998), is a spellbinding story of bereavement. In the wake of her entomologist lover’s suicidal fall down a tenement airshaft, Isabelle “Izzy” Oystershifl, a banker and mathematician from New Jersey, slogs through her grief, realizing just how deeply he affected her soul. Izzy occasionally tends bar in the Irish joint owned by Tim’s brother, Mark, and ponders everything from her faith in reason to the possibility that she might be pregnant. She also looks after the flea circus Tim left behind. In 23 chapters, titled after words beginning with the letters A through W, the novel seamlessly weaves between Izzy’s memories of the past, from which she pieces together an obsessive portrait of Tim, and the present, where she turns to another flea-obsessed entomologist, Pudge Goroguchi, as a fill-in lover, and creates mathematical formulas based on Tim’s fall. Although Izzy’s anguish might prove stagy or irritating in a lesser writer’s hands, Keifetz creates a narrator whose whip-smart narration—sex-drenched, hilarious, and full of wordplay—is anything but a downer. — Jonathan Fullmer
despite the gorgeous Eric Drooker cover, and the fact that Entertainment Weekly called it “an intoxicating cocktail of sex and death” this one is more or less out of print