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The Fugitives

Christopher Sorrentino

3.05 · Rating details · 214 ratings · 53 reviews

From National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino, a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, compulsion and free will…

Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that’s maimed his public reputation, he’s retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to fin From National Book Award finalist Christopher Sorrentino, a bracing, kaleidoscopic look at love and obsession, loyalty and betrayal, race and identity, compulsion and free will…

Sandy Mulligan is in trouble. To escape his turbulent private life and the scandal that’s maimed his public reputation, he’s retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. 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 of elusive ethnic origins who arrives to investigate a theft from a nearby 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’s sudden appearance in town immediately attracts a restive Sandy.

As the novel weaves among these characters uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories, we learn that all three are fugitives of one kind or another, harboring secrets that threaten to overturn their invented lives and the stories they tell to spin them into being. In their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the others’ games—all of them just one mistake from losing everything.

The signature Sorrentino touches that captivated readers of Trance are all here: sparkling dialogue, narrative urgency, mordant wit, and inventive, crystalline prose—but it is the deeply imagined interior lives of its characters that set this novel apart. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives is at once a love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller. It is also 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 in a world that’s connected in almost every way.

Exuberantly satirical, darkly enigmatic, and completely unforgettable, The Fugitives is an event that reaffirms Sorrentino’s position as an American writer of the first rank. ...more

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Hardcover, 322 pages

Published February 9th 2016 by Simon Schuster

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Jun 23, 2020 MJ Nicholls rated it really liked it

Shelves: merkins, novels, new-in-2016

The reviews here attest to the pointlessness of sending ARCs to randoms unfamiliar with the author. Chris Sorrentino is the son of Gilbert Sorrentino, the finest post-60s American innovator and novelist, period, important to know. Chris walks the tightrope between the formal playfulness of the paterfamilias, a rage at the publishing world (like father, like), and a more mainstreamish mystery plot and character-driven narrative. The result is an uneven stew of Mulligan—writer-protagonist—propelle ...more

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Jan 28, 2016 Sandra rated it liked it

Shelves: from-publisher, 2016, arc, netgalley

Christopher Sorrentino is a gifted word crafter. His writing is intricate and clever, however slightly too dense to enjoy it easily. Took me twice as long to finish it, I kept reading and rereading certain passages just to make sure I understood what was written.
The story picked up pace in the second half of the book, which is were the mystery/crime part of the novel finally started to make sense.
Folktales about the trickster Nanabozho in between book parts were a delight to read and kept the no ...more

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Jan 07, 2016 Doug H rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: advance-copy

I had a complicated reaction to this novel. For me, it was brilliant in some aspects but depressing and hard to get into in others.

Some of the descriptive language is fantastic (especially in setting scenes) and the sharp dialogue is often laugh out loud funny (think Pynchon), but the stuff that I didn't like kept my brain almost completely bogged down and uninterested throughout. This is probably why it took me two weeks to read it. It definitely wasn't a story I looked forward to jumping back ...more

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Nov 21, 2015 nikkia neil rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

Thanks Simon & Schuster and netgalley for this arc.

Loved the way we have to work for a while to get what's going on! This is a treat for those bored with dumb-ed up "literary" novels. I didn't want it to end.
...more

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Feb 04, 2016 Katherine rated it really liked it

Award-winning author Christopher Sorrentino, whose writing has been compared to Don DeLillo, Hunter S Thompson and Philip Roth, brings us a story of race, identity, story-telling and truth in The Fugitives.

If I arrive at the library before eleven, I’ll wait. There’s no other feeling like that of the restraint in a quiet room filled with people. Conditional unity, breached under the duress of petty bodily betrayals, farts and sneezes. The heads come up, mildly curious, then fall once more to the

If I arrive at the library before eleven, I’ll wait. There’s no other feeling like that of the restraint in a quiet room filled with people. Conditional unity, breached under the duress of petty bodily betrayals, farts and sneezes. The heads come up, mildly curious, then fall once more to the printed lines.

Sandy is a fugitive from his ex-wife and the relationships that have caused a scandal back in New York. He flees to Michigan, hoping the seclusion will help him finish his latest novel. Kat flees her clingy, needy boyfriend and an unsatisfying job, chasing a story that might propel her career into what she really wants. She’s also fleeing her past, as she seeks anonymity and abandons her cultural identity. They meet at a library, where John Salteau tells “Native Tales” to children. However, is he really who he claims to be? Or is he too a fugitive, hiding in plain sight from the local mobsters?

Only a very few were born to love the status quo, at least insofar as they were certain that it contained a privileged place for them. Everyone else, accommodating it in all of its arbitrary contradictions, effaced to a certain extent what they’d been branded with at birth. But Nables couldn’t erase the rubbed ebony skin, the full lips, the broad nose with the flaring nostrils, and he was even less capable of erasing the stroke of indignation connecting his every decision to a central motivation. So he messed with his staff. It was a way of actively not waiting for the chimerical story that would force the world to apologize for being itself.

My first impression was overwhelmingly positive. I highlighted almost every other paragraph to quote later; Christopher Sorrentino really knows how to put a sentence together. I liked the characters and I was interested in the story of some gangster pretending to be a Chippewa Indian. It was interesting to see how the book touched on the workings of the publishing industry, concepts of identity and race (and how we create identity through the stories we tell ourselves), and the action-packed parts were exciting. However, as I read on, small flaws started to bother me.

Oh how well she’d avoided Becky Chasse for ten years. Just didn’t want to go wherever that might lead. People bobbed up all the time, more often than you’d ever dream; she pictured a billion souls spread out across the night, each tapping the names of the lost into a search engine by the light of a single lamp. But happy reunions were for Facebook, a nice smooth interface between you and all the bad habits and ancient disharmonies. Who was waiting for you in the vast digital undertow there? Kat avoided it.

Sorrentino’s style is very intellectual; he writes long, dense sentences that sometimes need to be unpacked a little. Sometimes a paragraph covers multiple pages and when you get to the end you’re still not sure what it was pointing you towards. This is not a quick, easy read; it requires the reader to do a bit of work, and there’s a lot of reading between the lines that must happen as well. He plays with form, sometimes to great effect. Sometimes it was a little confusing. Even with a degree in literature, and the handy built-in Kindle dictionary, I found it tricky to get the main point behind what a lot of the book was saying. I feel like this is a book the critics and literati will love, but the laymen will simply scratch their heads and feel inadequate as the point goes soaring over their heads.

To erase yourself completely was commonly thought to be the most difficult of feats. Most people’s identities were important to them, something they wouldn’t shed. It was proud, it was timid, it was laudable, it was stupid. It stuck people with dumb friends and crummy marriages. Trapped them in dead towns and murderous neighborhoods. It manufactured tradition from the uninterrupted drudgery of successive generations. It transformed ignorant belief into folklore, and ignorance itself into defiance. Identity was a trap.

However, it’s not all bad. For instance, Sorrentino does some interesting things with form, using his two narrators (one in first person, and utterly unreliable, and the other slightly more reliable third, but very selective and secretive) to tell the story. It was slightly repetitive until I realised what was going on; there were tiny contradictions pointing out the flaws in their stories, both in how they describe themselves and how they describe the world around them. Sandy frequently glosses over the truth, choosing instead the version that portrays himself in the best light, while Kat’s cynicism exaggerates the negatives and ignores many positives. It was very cunningly done; I feel like Sorrentino gleefully distracts the reader with long, dense monologues about publishing and race and identity, sucking you in as you believe everything you’re told, until, in the end, with Iain Banks-like flair, nothing has any substance or certainty. I finished the book, completely confused. But I enjoyed the ride.

Your authority derived from the story you recognized to be about yourself. You adopted it, told it, then found other people who told the same story. The days of evading witnesses were over. The witnesses eliminated themselves; faded into the fabric of new jobs, new cities, new pastimes, new friends; multiple vectors diverging from a common originating point. The days of people were over. It was a vast democratic plurality of groups out there – political parties, associations, alumni, fans, account holders, veterans, employees, signatories, professions, and end users. Join and vanish. Learn the secret handshake, get the secret haircut. Try to be a person and you realized just how alone you really were. The only thing to do was to break away, shed what marked you before you were shed and disowned.

Is it a flaw for a book to be too clever? Maybe. For me, I found that the most interesting part of the story got about 5% of the attention. I cared more about Salteau and his real identity, and how he went about conning people, and what happened to the missing money, and the gangsters and Becky and so on, than I did about Sandy’s narcissistic existential crises, or Kat’s bitter self-loathing and their mutual self-destruction. As interested as I am about the publishing process and the “death of print”, I skimmed most of Monte, Nables and Dylan’s monologues about them. I’m sure there are people who will appreciate the intertextuality and meta and fourth-wall breaking and so on; for me, it felt like a load of pretentious waffling, whingeing and obfuscation that took narrative time away from the real story. This book is a lot of work to understand, and I feel like I missed the main point of it. However, the words sounded good together, the characters were great, the main premise was gripping and I loved how the narration of the story became a pivotal part of the story as well.

I received this book from the publisher for free, in exchange for an honest review. You can read more of my reviews at Literogo.com. ...more

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Mar 26, 2016 Rebecca Weinstein rated it it was amazing

It is a given that Sorrentino's writing is smart, technically exceptional, and verging on intimidating. What isn't a given is whether it touches you. A writer's writer can make the reader work for it. What Sorrentino does so well in this book is take the reader just to the line. It's deep, not just hard. There is almost an uncomfortable level of insight in the storytelling, and I think what this book does best is tell stories. What those stories are didn't so much matter to me, as did the fact t ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Donna Davis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-crime-fict-etc, reviewed, net-galley, fiction-adult, arc-simon-and-sch, literary-fiction, blogged

Sandy Mulligan is a renowned author, but he’s hit a crisis. He’s left his wife and children for someone else, and it didn’t work out. Now he’s taken to the hinterlands to try to write the book he’s contracted to produce. Meanwhile, he runs across John Salteau, who claims to be an Ojibway storyteller, but it doesn’t ring quite true. Like Mulligan, Salteau is hiding from something. And if that isn’t enough, we have Kat Danhoff, herself a refugee of sorts, and she has landed in the same tiny burg, ...more

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Dec 05, 2015 Michael rated it really liked it

I received this from Netgalley, though would have read anyway because I like Sorrentino. A slow burn crime thriller with a literary bent, this was a cool book all wrapped up with a nice how at the end.

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Feb 03, 2016 Kathleen Gray rated it liked it

Pretentious. I just didn't like this- sorry to Simon and Schuster, which granted me the ARC. I had high hopes for it because it had a good premise and because i've liked Sorrentino in the past. This time, though, I didn't get very far, closing my Kindle long before I expected I would. ...more

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Jan 07, 2016 Lauren marked it as never-finishing

This author crams in 15 vocabulary words and 3 metaphors into every description of a mundane object or interaction. It's exhausting and horrible. 60 pages and I'm OUT.
...more

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Dec 21, 2015 Jo Dervan rated it really liked it

Kat, a reporter from a Chicago newspaper, follows a lead from Becky, her friend on the Indian reservation and ends up in Cherry City, MI. According to Becky, Jackie Salteau, a local storyteller who has been captivating locals at the public library, is really John Santino, an ex-convict working at the local Indian casino who disappeared with $450,000 months before. Kat decided that if she could expose Salteau as the missing Saltino, she would have a great story about the mob influence in Indian c ...more

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Feb 04, 2016 Gareth Price rated it really liked it

I am a big fan of Christopher Sorrentino's Trance and it seems like an age has passed since it was published. The Fugitives probably isn't quite as good as that epic imagining of a band of urban guerillas in the '70's but it has plenty to enjoy.

Writer Sandy Mulligan has retreated to a small Michigan town to write his long overdue next book and escape his failed marriage. Instead he spends some of his mornings at the local local library listening to John Salteau, an Ojibway Indian, tell tradition ...more

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Jan 22, 2016 Liz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: netgalley

The Fugitives is a novel full of twists and turns, a mystery with intriguing characters that captured my interest. I wanted to know who the cast of characters were and what were their motives. Sandy Mulligan, a famous novelist, is the at the center of the ensemble of characters that populate a story full of questions. The book cover shows a gambling scene and I think you could say that describes much of what goes on with each character, they take a gamble on a story, on making money on getting a ...more

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May 02, 2016 Sarah rated it it was ok

There were parts of this that were so well written-- cutting, sharp, and funny-- but a lot of this felt messy and unrefined. There's just too much going on.

Am I meant to focus on the crazy plot twists or the unsentimental commentary on white privilege? Do I roll along, happily chuckling at the library scenes, or do I keep turning pages to find out whodunnit and whodunwho and which car did they use, anyway?

And wait. Gangster ghosts? ...more

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Jan 05, 2016 Sloan rated it it was amazing

An existential romp using a mystery as a vehicle, The Fugitives never fails to entertain as it probes questions about the extent to which we attempt to escape the paths that evolve in our lives.

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Sep 06, 2016 Megan rated it did not like it

Recommended to Megan by: The Millions

Sorrentino jerked off on a keyboard for three days and autocorrect turned it into this book. And Sorrentino's just so fucking clever, he got it published. ...more

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Aug 15, 2017 Mark Lisac rated it it was ok

The Fugitives is the literary equivalent of "all hat, no cattle": all style, no heart.
And while there are flashes of humour and cutting social commentary, there really isn't much in the way of good writing, despite many reviewers' claims. The style essentially consists of clever superficiality. It seems like a running echo of social media attitude and the despondently coarse imitation of humour oozing through most Hollywood "comedies" since the late 1990s. There's also a fair bit of excess verbi ...more

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Aug 21, 2018 James rated it it was ok

Just because an author is aware that it is ridiculous to make fiction in the modern world doesn't mean he has to write a character who is an author who is aware that it is ridiculous to make fiction in the modern world. It shouldn't be a surprise that this character is unlikable, or that very little happens in a plot that revolves at some level around this character's writer's block. Sorrentino can obviously write, but he shouldn't have written this book. ...more

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Dec 21, 2019 Kathleen Finney rated it liked it

Generally an interesting plot, with a degree of suspense, but the stakes somehow don't seem to come across as that high even when lives are in danger. The main characters weren't really fully formed, and the character of Kat was a puzzle to me. Her primary trait appears to be a desire to perform oral sex on every man she meets. While at times the language is clever, I frequently felt like I was wading through paragraphs of contrived padding. ...more

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Jun 18, 2018 Angela rated it it was ok

A book that is 50% narrative summary - with a plot that reads like a stack of short stories - and just enough clever writing to keep you reading. It was interesting- good even in some parts - but I would t want to read another like it.

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Aug 30, 2019 Sharon rated it it was ok

Shelves: first-reads

Received this book from Goodreads. Half of the book that dealt with mystery, the people involved in the writing of a book involving money stolen, who did it, why, was good but the other half of the book seemed to me to be too long and unnecessary.

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May 16, 2017 Monica rated it it was ok

The first two-thirds or so of this book was fantastic, then it seemed like the author lost interest.

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Oct 01, 2018 Lee Thames rated it liked it

Shelves: crime-mystery-thriller

A mystery with a mishmash of broken characters. Our two narrators cannot be trusted.

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Nov 25, 2015 Gabriele rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: male-author, contemporary-fiction, america, michigan, 500-books, marriage, adultery

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 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. ...more

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Feb 03, 2016 Mainon rated it liked it

Shelves: arcs-galleys-and-review-copies, kindle-books

Two-thirds into the book, I hadn't really made up my mind about whether I liked it or not. The scaffolding along which the book unfolds is an intriguing little mystery: a former casino employee tips off a reporter friend about a secret casino heist. Secret because the stolen money was money already being skimmed off the top, so its theft couldn't be reported to the police. And according to the source, the guy who walked away with a cool half mil has popped back up in the area as a Native storyte Two-thirds into the book, I hadn't really made up my mind about whether I liked it or not. The scaffolding along which the book unfolds is an intriguing little mystery: a former casino employee tips off a reporter friend about a secret casino heist. Secret because the stolen money was money already being skimmed off the top, so its theft couldn't be reported to the police. And according to the source, the guy who walked away with a cool half mil has popped back up in the area as a Native storyteller, of all things, with a thinly disguised name. Did the theft really happen? If so, is the thief really the same guy as this storyteller who tells Native fables to the kids at the local library?
I liked the mystery. The stakes weren't terribly high, perhaps, but I really wanted to know the answers to those questions.
To get those answers, though, I had to wade through a lot of what felt like literary filler. One of the storyteller's admirers--and one of the book's primary narrators--is a successful novelist who's made a mess of his life, and his ruminations are sometimes self-loathing and sometimes self-aggrandizing, but always self-centered. He hits on the reporter who's investigating the mystery, and there's a lot of unnecessary detail about their sexual relationship. In fact, her sexual escapades figure pretty heavily in the book, although they're somehow an odd mix of sordid and relatively uninteresting. It's telling that of the reporter, who is the only significant female character in the book, we know much more of her affairs and bedroom proclivities than we do of her reporting style. She seems to be motivated by two things: generically, by wanting to break a big story, and less generically, by wanting to perform fellatio on various men. It just didn't make for a very interesting character, let alone one I could invest in.
That said, the mystery really picked up in the last third of the book, and I came to wish that the author had discarded some of his literary pretentions and written a really solid crime thriller instead. It ended on a fairly high note, and my feeling by the end of the book was that it was a four-star read. Only in thinking back over the course of the experience and rereading some notes I'd taken along the way was I reminded of the parts I didn't particularly enjoy.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. ...more

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Oct 26, 2016 Randy rated it really liked it

A formerly successful novelist, way behind on the delivery of his next manuscript, escapes the mess of his marriage, and a scandalous affair, by leaving Brooklyn for a quiet Michigan town near the locale of fondly remembered family holidays. There he wanders into the library for the regular storytelling of a Native American who delights listeners with indigenous fables. The storyteller begins the novel so you might imagine he features prominently, as he does, and you might also imagine there are ...more

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Feb 22, 2016 Patricia rated it liked it

A thriller about Alexander (Sandy) Mulligan, an author, who has hit a roadblock in most aspects of his life. He is behind in finishing a book, his marriage to Rae is a disaster and his affair with Susannah is over because of her suicide and also pregnancy. He moves to Cherry City, MI to get away from Brooklyn distractions and his life and book back on track. The book industry (Monte Arlecchino, Dylan Fecker (agent) and Boyd Harris) is squeezing him for breach of contract in not delivering the bo ...more

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Oct 01, 2015 Justin rated it it was amazing

I thought this was an insightful, funny, and ultimately tragic book about the way people disguise or distort themselves to embrace a new identity or put an old one behind them. This impulse toward disguise is embodied in the three main characters of the book, one, a story teller, a literal fugitive, one, a writer, running from a scandal, and the third, a reporter, who turns her back on her heritage to "pass." This sense of disguise and dishonesty is enhanced by the way the story is told. Each ch ...more

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Jun 15, 2016 THT Steph rated it it was ok

Shelves: contemporary, literary

Maybe a Little Too Clever
The Fugitives has a mix of a lot of interesting elements that I thought Sorrentino pulled together nicely, and I love his wit when it comes to phrasing. I pulled what is sure to be some of my all time favorite quotes from this book.. The story itself was good, and I connected with the interesting lot of characters. The difficulty that had was in every sentence needing to be some wonderful wordy phrase. It became tedious, and I actually ended up being forced to read in sm ...more

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Jan 05, 2018 Lisa rated it liked it

Shelves: did-not-finish

If there are actually 2 camps in the realm of lit appreciation, as reading over some of the reviews of this book has enlightened me to the possibility of, then I guess I would hope to land safely in the Courvoisier Camp-those who prefer writing that goes down smooth, uses common words for the most part, and a while after reading it your mind is confusing the characters and situations with people you know/knew because they're so well-drawn.
This isn't a criticism of the other camp- the It's Good B ...more

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About Christopher Sorrentino

Christopher Sorrentino

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Christopher Sorrentino (born May 20, 1963) is an American novelist and short story writer of Puerto Rican descent. He is the son of novelist Gilbert Sorrentino and Victoria Ortiz. His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers. The book is structured according t ...more

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“If there’s any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don’t know what it is.” — 3 likes

“Everything is 'smart' now. The library cataloging system is smart, classification and indexing information entered into a uniform online database. People wept and lamented the loss of the old cards, then forgot them. They pretty much forget everything they weep over and lament. Clop-clop of hooves on the street. The humble art of carrying a block of ice up the stairs, pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint.” — 1 likes

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