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Blizzard Party
A panoramic novel set in New York City during the catastrophic blizzard of February 1978.
On February 6, 1978, a catastrophic nor'easter struck the city of New York. On that night, in a penthouse in the Upper West Side's stately Apelles apartment building, a crowd gathered for a wild party. And on that night, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell--a partner emeritus at Swank, Brady & Plescher; Harvard class of '26; father of three; widower; atheist; and fiscal conservative--hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown.
In the eye of this storm: Hazel Saltwater, age six. The strange events of that night irrevocably altered many lives, but none more than hers. The Blizzard Party is Hazel's reconstruction of the facts, an exploration of love, language, conspiracy, auditory time travel, and life after death. Cinematic, with a vast cast of characters and a historical scope that spans World War II Poland, the lives of rich and powerful Manhattanites in the late 1970s, and the enduring effects of 9/11, Jack Livings's The Blizzard Party is an epic novel in the form of a final farewell.
On February 6, 1978, a catastrophic nor'easter struck the city of New York. On that night, in a penthouse in the Upper West Side's stately Apelles apartment building, a crowd gathered for a wild party. And on that night, Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell--a partner emeritus at Swank, Brady & Plescher; Harvard class of '26; father of three; widower; atheist; and fiscal conservative--hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown.
In the eye of this storm: Hazel Saltwater, age six. The strange events of that night irrevocably altered many lives, but none more than hers. The Blizzard Party is Hazel's reconstruction of the facts, an exploration of love, language, conspiracy, auditory time travel, and life after death. Cinematic, with a vast cast of characters and a historical scope that spans World War II Poland, the lives of rich and powerful Manhattanites in the late 1970s, and the enduring effects of 9/11, Jack Livings's The Blizzard Party is an epic novel in the form of a final farewell.
416 pages, Paperback
First published February 23, 2021
94 people are currently reading
5412 people want to read
About the author
Jack Livings
3 books58 followersJack Livings is the author of The Dog, which won the PEN/Bingham Award for debut fiction and the Rome Prize for Literature. His novel, The Blizzard Party, a panoramic story set in New York in the late 1970s, will be published in winter 2021.
Jack was born in New York, grew up in South Carolina, and graduated from Davidson College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Jack was born in New York, grew up in South Carolina, and graduated from Davidson College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
July 26, 2022
Note: I received a free copy of this book. In exchange here is my honest review:
DNF… I told myself that in order to really give this book its fair shot, I’d make it to at least the 50% mark… 😉 The moment I made it halfway (and a good month of trying to force myself to finish) I closed it and will not be picking it up again. 😬 I just don’t get it. Pretentious. Pointless. Agonizing. I can’t torture myself anymore.
Thank you @goodreads and @stmartinspress #goodreadsgiveaway
DNF… I told myself that in order to really give this book its fair shot, I’d make it to at least the 50% mark… 😉 The moment I made it halfway (and a good month of trying to force myself to finish) I closed it and will not be picking it up again. 😬 I just don’t get it. Pretentious. Pointless. Agonizing. I can’t torture myself anymore.
Thank you @goodreads and @stmartinspress #goodreadsgiveaway
February 23, 2021
I received a free digital advance review copy from the publisher, via Netgalley.
I loved the idea of a novel taking place at a Manhattan apartment on the night of the famous blizzard of February 6, 1978. It turns out that Jack Livings, in his debut novel, has decided to go all out: spreading his story far and wide, with widely diverging storylines and meandering, wildly detailed prose.
It took me a long time to get into the book, I’ll confess. I couldn’t figure out what the book was about, who all these people were, how they connected. In the end, I’m still not sure. This is one of those books that’s more about the writing than character development or a coherent plot.
Debut authors often take a kitchen-sink approach to their novels, and Livings is no different. It’s like he’s taken every idea he ever had and crammed it into this kaleidoscopic trip of a novel. He also belongs to the school of the more description the better. He has a 65-word sentence describing one of those happy face shopping bags. It’s not really a description of the bag so much as a commentary on American communication style, but still.
I should add a Goodreads shelf called Appreciated But Didn’t Enjoy. I can understand why some readers loved this book. I’m just too conventional a reader to fall in with them.
I loved the idea of a novel taking place at a Manhattan apartment on the night of the famous blizzard of February 6, 1978. It turns out that Jack Livings, in his debut novel, has decided to go all out: spreading his story far and wide, with widely diverging storylines and meandering, wildly detailed prose.
It took me a long time to get into the book, I’ll confess. I couldn’t figure out what the book was about, who all these people were, how they connected. In the end, I’m still not sure. This is one of those books that’s more about the writing than character development or a coherent plot.
Debut authors often take a kitchen-sink approach to their novels, and Livings is no different. It’s like he’s taken every idea he ever had and crammed it into this kaleidoscopic trip of a novel. He also belongs to the school of the more description the better. He has a 65-word sentence describing one of those happy face shopping bags. It’s not really a description of the bag so much as a commentary on American communication style, but still.
I should add a Goodreads shelf called Appreciated But Didn’t Enjoy. I can understand why some readers loved this book. I’m just too conventional a reader to fall in with them.
February 19, 2023
Thanks to Goodreads and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC.
I didn't get past page 20 of this book. I'm still scratching my head thinking what am I reading. There had to be a plot somewhere and a connection.
Sorry, this book wasn't for me.
I didn't get past page 20 of this book. I'm still scratching my head thinking what am I reading. There had to be a plot somewhere and a connection.
Sorry, this book wasn't for me.
March 3, 2021
I won this book in a goodreads drawing.
During the New York blizzard of 1978, somebody's having a party. It isn't much fun and bad things happen. Filled with unpleasant, neurotic people.
During the New York blizzard of 1978, somebody's having a party. It isn't much fun and bad things happen. Filled with unpleasant, neurotic people.
February 14, 2021
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. I loved the author’s last book called The Dog, which was a book of short stories that dazzled by quickly thrusting us into different and varied worlds in modern day China. Now his first novel is even more impressive. The epic sprawl of the book starts on a huge snowstorm storm in NYC in 1978 and includes the residents of an upper west side apartment building called The Apelles, where an out of control party is taking place in a large penthouse apartment. From this apartment and this one day we meet over a dozen characters that show us not only this day, but take us back to World War II, glimpses of the Vietnam War, to 9/11 and beyond. The novel goes down a million side roads, but always comes back to Hazel Saltwater who was six years old at the night of the party. We see her life then and follow her to the woman she becomes today. I thought this novel was was equally parts intelligent, exhaustive and never less than fascinating.
July 3, 2021
I can't say that i really enjoyed this Jackson Pollack of a book, a kaleidoscope of stories bound together by a blizzard (that left the north east blanketed in endless snow, people walking outside in the sun and sledding down hills), but I never thought I wouldn't finish it.
All the stories are interesting- except for the largely improbable one of the female narrator, who doesn't seem female, or probable. All snow flakes rushing or drifting down, no one alike, just all brought together by the blizzard.
The two towers going down, Nazi slave factories, Nuremberg, psychiatry, word games, Princton, sadomasochism, - well you name it. Reminds me of Infinite Jest but more interesting (because not tennis, although a little Finnish ski jumping).
Livings is enormously talented, he writes like a dream. Too bad he didn't have Max Perkins (Editor of Genius!) to help him through this book. Maybe the next one?
All the stories are interesting- except for the largely improbable one of the female narrator, who doesn't seem female, or probable. All snow flakes rushing or drifting down, no one alike, just all brought together by the blizzard.
The two towers going down, Nazi slave factories, Nuremberg, psychiatry, word games, Princton, sadomasochism, - well you name it. Reminds me of Infinite Jest but more interesting (because not tennis, although a little Finnish ski jumping).
Livings is enormously talented, he writes like a dream. Too bad he didn't have Max Perkins (Editor of Genius!) to help him through this book. Maybe the next one?
February 25, 2021
This really is an astounding book. The writing, wordplay, and scope of the novel is breathtaking. It continues to grow and fold in upon itself with each new character introduced. It is also, I will admit, meandering, sometimes confusing, and perhaps too ambitious. Still I loved this book and will look for more from this author.
I received an eARC through NetGalley.
I received an eARC through NetGalley.
January 30, 2022
A professional proofreader, pimp to a stable of freelancers, told me last year that she no longer reads for pleasure. The work has spoiled it for her. And I can kind of see that, although the possibility depresses me.
While my paid work does not prevent me from reading (yet), maybe my earlier training in Literary Theory, and its cousin, Critical Thinking, are why I tend to read more memoir than fiction. Because when I read fiction, I see the story and the players on the stage, but sometimes I am distracted by the scaffolding, by the pulleys and levers, and the writer, standing stage right, pulling them.
I was weighed down by the Blizzard Party’s chutes and ladders: nonlinear narrative, new characters appearing from nowhere to cross paths with established actors, a narrator whose presence is forgotten for whole sections and then suddenly announced with a first-person pronoun, refusal to resolve the plot in the moment. But it’s just a complicated exercise. Between the machinations, there are hints at better craft.
Words that I had to look up:
• pareidolian
• cicatrice
• pappus
• bathypelagic zone
While my paid work does not prevent me from reading (yet), maybe my earlier training in Literary Theory, and its cousin, Critical Thinking, are why I tend to read more memoir than fiction. Because when I read fiction, I see the story and the players on the stage, but sometimes I am distracted by the scaffolding, by the pulleys and levers, and the writer, standing stage right, pulling them.
I was weighed down by the Blizzard Party’s chutes and ladders: nonlinear narrative, new characters appearing from nowhere to cross paths with established actors, a narrator whose presence is forgotten for whole sections and then suddenly announced with a first-person pronoun, refusal to resolve the plot in the moment. But it’s just a complicated exercise. Between the machinations, there are hints at better craft.
Words that I had to look up:
• pareidolian
• cicatrice
• pappus
• bathypelagic zone
March 7, 2021
I came so close to DNFing this book. I can appreciate the style of writing that Livings brings to the book, though. That in itself I think has a very artful quality to it. However, I could NOT get into any of the character's stories at all, and felt that the tangents that Livings would go off on each character we were introduced to in the book did not need to happen. Did we really need like 4, 20+ page chapters on the neighbor Turk and how she offered Hazel a job? I just failed to see a connection between all these tangents. All this and I failed to see how the party actually played a crucial role in the plot? It just seemed like it was an excuse to get them all together for a book that very well could have been something that was written about without the party.
I think from the get-go I was just really disinterested in what every character had to say, and each of the backstories felt really long. None of them really seemed to contribute to the plot of the book except maybe Hazel's father, Albert's backstory, and John's backstory. Everything else could have been left out of this book and I think it would have made very little difference. I truly just could not get into it.
I think from the get-go I was just really disinterested in what every character had to say, and each of the backstories felt really long. None of them really seemed to contribute to the plot of the book except maybe Hazel's father, Albert's backstory, and John's backstory. Everything else could have been left out of this book and I think it would have made very little difference. I truly just could not get into it.
January 7, 2025
Well written and with outstanding prose. No doubt a very good book, but I’m left wanting by the ending. Maybe it makes me a brainless reader of contemporary fiction, but I wanted a little more weaving and satisfaction at the end because I felt set up for that.
April 30, 2021
I don't think this is too *spoilerish*, but fair warning: my general thoughts could be considered a bit of a giveaway.
___________________
This is a densely-packed drama. At first, the atmospherics rule: the sights, sounds, the nonchalant eccentricity on display. The characters slowly emerge and begin to unwind, first through inner monologues, and later through bizarrely interconnected actions. The narrative is metaphor-rich and the residential building at the center of it all seems a living, breathing thing, choking from all the secrets inside.
There is tragedy and mystery, most of it guilt-driven, and the story is is a feast of introspection. It's also an irony wrapped in self-critique: you, the reader, want to belong to the club that understands a book like this, about people who are comfortable with literature, philosophy, art, and music, but are also desperate not to look like fools or misfits, who hide behind contrived personas. When it comes right down to it, aren't we all pseudo-intellectuals? We want to preen and strut our way right out of our own insecurities. The harder we pretend, the more glaringly obvious it is to everyone that we're frauds. We can't even be our own selves correctly. That is, unless we become so practiced at stagecraft that we believe it ourselves, which is the very definition of pathology.
Sometimes you need to scream, just to clear the noise inside your head. These characters can't scream loud enough or long enough. They need a dramatic excavation.
The weight of disaster can be imposed from the top down, but just as often, it works its way up from the deepest substrates. The substance of truth can be pressed down into layers, but eventually, like a loaded spring, it must expand up and out, blowing the lid off of all those carefully preserved layers of suppression. Even the first elevator scenes, where everyone is scrambling and jostling for position to "get to the top" is a metaphor. Each of the main characters scrabbles from obscurity to notoriety. And in some ways, they all regret it. They lead complicated lives, in which the simplest things are waiting, just to bring them down.
It's an incredible story, and very nearly perfect. The science of transubstantiation was a bit of a distraction to me and IMHO, not purely necessary. I also would have tightened up the last 100 pages, but overall, this is great writing, and the story stuck with me long after I finished reading it. Definitely recommend.
___________________
This is a densely-packed drama. At first, the atmospherics rule: the sights, sounds, the nonchalant eccentricity on display. The characters slowly emerge and begin to unwind, first through inner monologues, and later through bizarrely interconnected actions. The narrative is metaphor-rich and the residential building at the center of it all seems a living, breathing thing, choking from all the secrets inside.
There is tragedy and mystery, most of it guilt-driven, and the story is is a feast of introspection. It's also an irony wrapped in self-critique: you, the reader, want to belong to the club that understands a book like this, about people who are comfortable with literature, philosophy, art, and music, but are also desperate not to look like fools or misfits, who hide behind contrived personas. When it comes right down to it, aren't we all pseudo-intellectuals? We want to preen and strut our way right out of our own insecurities. The harder we pretend, the more glaringly obvious it is to everyone that we're frauds. We can't even be our own selves correctly. That is, unless we become so practiced at stagecraft that we believe it ourselves, which is the very definition of pathology.
Sometimes you need to scream, just to clear the noise inside your head. These characters can't scream loud enough or long enough. They need a dramatic excavation.
The weight of disaster can be imposed from the top down, but just as often, it works its way up from the deepest substrates. The substance of truth can be pressed down into layers, but eventually, like a loaded spring, it must expand up and out, blowing the lid off of all those carefully preserved layers of suppression. Even the first elevator scenes, where everyone is scrambling and jostling for position to "get to the top" is a metaphor. Each of the main characters scrabbles from obscurity to notoriety. And in some ways, they all regret it. They lead complicated lives, in which the simplest things are waiting, just to bring them down.
It's an incredible story, and very nearly perfect. The science of transubstantiation was a bit of a distraction to me and IMHO, not purely necessary. I also would have tightened up the last 100 pages, but overall, this is great writing, and the story stuck with me long after I finished reading it. Definitely recommend.
February 18, 2024
Well I read this book because of a Times review, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that upon completion, I shelved Jack among my Pynchons. I kept feeling like I was adjacent to Against the Day or Gravity's Rainbow the whole time I was reading; while obviously no one can compete for Pynchon's dazzling sprawl, Livings evokes many of the same building blocks -- "metaphors begetting metaphors" as promised in the above-referenced review, not to mention clauses begetting clauses, asides begetting asides, seemingly wildly unconnected digressions begetting more and more and more of the same.
Livings also has the same let's say distaste for a traditional narrative structure; instead of a focused narrative thrust, you might follow a tertiary character down dozens and dozens of pages, having fully forgotten how they even connect to the main story by the time the chapter eventually, finally breaks. And there's similar decadent drug-fueled hijinks, sudden perfect snappy dialogue amid mountains of exposition, fixations on the bleakest devastations of war, steampunk-y futurism, technological advances shimmering toward mysticism, introspection keyed up to such a degree that a character's self-reflection winds up somehow encompassing the whole world and everything in it.
Anyway this was rarely easy reading, and trying to reflect upon what I even just managed to read feels slippery at best, but it was a pretty raucous and delightful ride.
Livings also has the same let's say distaste for a traditional narrative structure; instead of a focused narrative thrust, you might follow a tertiary character down dozens and dozens of pages, having fully forgotten how they even connect to the main story by the time the chapter eventually, finally breaks. And there's similar decadent drug-fueled hijinks, sudden perfect snappy dialogue amid mountains of exposition, fixations on the bleakest devastations of war, steampunk-y futurism, technological advances shimmering toward mysticism, introspection keyed up to such a degree that a character's self-reflection winds up somehow encompassing the whole world and everything in it.
Anyway this was rarely easy reading, and trying to reflect upon what I even just managed to read feels slippery at best, but it was a pretty raucous and delightful ride.
March 7, 2021
“We like to believe we can control the story, he says, or for that matter how we live, not that there’s really any difference. But we don’t. The truth comes when it’s ready. It hides when it’s not. Don’t confuse fact with truth.”
I’M. NOT. READY. TO. LET. THESE. CHARACTERS. GO. Or maybe they’re not ready to let me go? This is one I’ll be thinking about for a while. Is about a party in NY during the blizzard of 78? Sure, I guess, but that premise serves as an opening into an exhausting exploration of grief. If you’re looking for happiness, sunshine, and rainbows, best look elsewhere. If you’ve ever questioned if you were an actor in a carefully constructive narrative that’s well beyond your control, if you’ve ever searched for meaning in the minutia, if you’ve ever assigned yourself more blame and carried more than your fair share of that heavy weight, well throw on your snow suit and grab your shovel because this is the place to be!
If i haven’t made it clear yet, this one isn’t exactly the easiest of reads, but it’s definitely worth it. It certainly takes its time laying the breadcrumbs and tying them all together. In fact, near the beginning there’s a long chapter involving a fishing trip that nearly made me stop reading because it felt like things were going nowhere. Boy was I wrong.
I’M. NOT. READY. TO. LET. THESE. CHARACTERS. GO. Or maybe they’re not ready to let me go? This is one I’ll be thinking about for a while. Is about a party in NY during the blizzard of 78? Sure, I guess, but that premise serves as an opening into an exhausting exploration of grief. If you’re looking for happiness, sunshine, and rainbows, best look elsewhere. If you’ve ever questioned if you were an actor in a carefully constructive narrative that’s well beyond your control, if you’ve ever searched for meaning in the minutia, if you’ve ever assigned yourself more blame and carried more than your fair share of that heavy weight, well throw on your snow suit and grab your shovel because this is the place to be!
If i haven’t made it clear yet, this one isn’t exactly the easiest of reads, but it’s definitely worth it. It certainly takes its time laying the breadcrumbs and tying them all together. In fact, near the beginning there’s a long chapter involving a fishing trip that nearly made me stop reading because it felt like things were going nowhere. Boy was I wrong.
July 3, 2021
"The Pavlovian compact by which all Americans live, the promise that anguish is eventually terminated by an endorphin release, took a rain check on this one. Someone forgot to pay the electric on the effervescent promise that as long as I worked through my pain it would all pay off in the end, because anything that pays off is worth it, worth it because we are made stronger by our suffering."
Jack Livings's sprawling, time hopping, ensemble has reviews on here that are all over the place, but I found it masterful. It sometimes feels guided by a steady authorial hand, while other times seems to meander through "plot" the way life itself does — and if readers want more shape & refinement from their fiction, I totally get that.
On a mechanical level — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — this is some of the best writing I've come across in recent memory.
Jack Livings's sprawling, time hopping, ensemble has reviews on here that are all over the place, but I found it masterful. It sometimes feels guided by a steady authorial hand, while other times seems to meander through "plot" the way life itself does — and if readers want more shape & refinement from their fiction, I totally get that.
On a mechanical level — sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph — this is some of the best writing I've come across in recent memory.
dnf-and-tabled
March 29, 2021No thank you. This feels WAY too pretentious and without purpose.
April 16, 2021
Life is too short to waste time reading a book like this.
October 1, 2024
I read far too infrequently to appreciate a story so elaborately and precisely plotted out. Starting a new chapter is like picking up book 3 of a series you started reading a year ago. So many names, so many ideas, and so many events out of chronological order. The prose is witty and eloquent, and the internal logic of the book might be genius, but I didn’t fully understand it. Some of the anecdotes in this book will stay with me, and I really enjoyed reading it when I could get into the rhythm, but I don’t think he stuck the landing. We’ll have to see if after some contemplation I go back and give this guy another star.
Want to read
November 25, 2020While certainly not uplifting, this is well written. It has a large cast, and an interesting plot that kept me mostly engaged. For readers that don't mind a pretty well written, but rather depressing tale, this may work.
Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!
Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!
Read
January 28, 2023I dare you to predict correctly, even one time, what will happen on the next page! Can't be done.
June 14, 2021
Actually, I rate this one zero stars. An overly complicated, verbose, 400 pages of meandering the author should have offered in a 40 page short story. Readers are forced to endure excruciatingly lengthy, minute, details of characters, events and introspection that end up bearing no relevance to the story. There are only 2-3 characters necessary to tell this story; I find it difficult to recommend to anyone other than those who fancy themselves erudite sophisticates. Livings exhausted his entire vocabulary- what's left?
Want to read
February 26, 2021Literary Hub, February 26, 2021
March 14, 2021
Incredible coup d’état! What a gem of a book! This book held me in it’s thrall from the opening pages and I could not put it down. A magnificent masterpiece. Highly recommend!
August 18, 2021
You can read my review at BookBrowse Review here:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review...
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/review...
February 7, 2024
Before reviewing, I need to explain how I chose this book. I thought I was being quite clever, actually. I wanted a book that felt as if it truly belonged in a February book blog. During my search, I found this book, which is centered around a blizzard in New York on February 6, 1978. February, check. Winter-weather, check. Setting that fits in my "something old" category, check. Author who completed some of his writing training in Iowa, extra credit check. Check, check, check went all those boxes. What I didn't take into account, was the mind space that this book would require. And here we enter into the review.
I'll be completely honest in my very first sentence. This book was a DNF (in the book world: Did Not Finish) for me. I kept trying to convince myself to give it just a few more pages. That surely things would start to fall into place and I'd be sucked into the story which had such a good premise on the inside book jacket flap. Just three pages in, I'd already had to reread several paragraphs a second time, hoping they'd make more sense after taking it in twice. (They didn't!) I consider myself to be fairly good at following complex book narratives, twists, even multiple viewpoints and timelines. But this. This was just so much. It was so, for lack of a better word, wordy. The author used 78 words (I counted) in a run-on sentence to describe the contents of a briefcase. In another sentence, 91 words to communicate to readers how one of the characters stepped into a slippery boat. I had to look up the word retroperistalsis to find out what was happening to a character (they were vomiting). I wish I were exaggerating. (I'm not.) As I trudged along (which felt similar to how I feel walking my dog through melting piles of slushy, heavy snow) I told myself I would make it to page 100 and then decide. Well, at page 92 I couldn't stand reading one more single word and I shut the book.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Even if you write a previous blog post stating that you are going to read a specific book for the next month's blog, and you're the type of person who really likes following through on things like that...there are too many books in this world to suffer through one that you truly don't get/like/enjoy. Shut the book. Put it down. Pick up the next one.
https://sosnssst.wixsite.com/allbooke...
I'll be completely honest in my very first sentence. This book was a DNF (in the book world: Did Not Finish) for me. I kept trying to convince myself to give it just a few more pages. That surely things would start to fall into place and I'd be sucked into the story which had such a good premise on the inside book jacket flap. Just three pages in, I'd already had to reread several paragraphs a second time, hoping they'd make more sense after taking it in twice. (They didn't!) I consider myself to be fairly good at following complex book narratives, twists, even multiple viewpoints and timelines. But this. This was just so much. It was so, for lack of a better word, wordy. The author used 78 words (I counted) in a run-on sentence to describe the contents of a briefcase. In another sentence, 91 words to communicate to readers how one of the characters stepped into a slippery boat. I had to look up the word retroperistalsis to find out what was happening to a character (they were vomiting). I wish I were exaggerating. (I'm not.) As I trudged along (which felt similar to how I feel walking my dog through melting piles of slushy, heavy snow) I told myself I would make it to page 100 and then decide. Well, at page 92 I couldn't stand reading one more single word and I shut the book.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Even if you write a previous blog post stating that you are going to read a specific book for the next month's blog, and you're the type of person who really likes following through on things like that...there are too many books in this world to suffer through one that you truly don't get/like/enjoy. Shut the book. Put it down. Pick up the next one.
https://sosnssst.wixsite.com/allbooke...
May 13, 2022
In February of 1978, a huge nor'easter blanketed the northeast in many feet of snow. This blizzard is the setting of The Blizzard Party by Jack Livings, a retelling and a corrective of an in-novel novel also called The Blizzard Party that took place during the titular blizzard party. At least, that's when some of it takes place, and what some of it is about. Hazel Saltwater is 6 years old in 1978 and lives in the Apelles, a co-op that takes up an entire city block in the 70s. She gets taken to the party when an earlier accident leaves her mother no choice but to seek out the medical help of their upstairs neighbor because the storm has shut down the city. Not seriously injured, the neighbor, who is throwing the party, invites her to stay. Hazel's mother leaves her in an empty room to watch old sitcom reruns. The party turns into a bacchanal, and soon a confluence of events, which Hazel has an inactive part in, rocks the party. Her father, a novelist, writes a hugely successful book (The Blizzard Party) based on the party, not even changing names, cementing Hazel forever as that six year old. As an adult, Hazel, who is dealing with her own adult trauma, wants to right what she felt is wrong with what happened. What we get is the true(?), or more accurate(?) version of events, which includes a large swath of characters. Livings gives us their story as well. In the telling, it also becomes a post-9/11 book, as it deals with communal trauma and healing. This is where the book both succeeds and falters, by being as discursive and expansive as it is. The story doesn't feel focused (give me more of the party!), but it does feel intentional. Plus Livings has a way with the words, so even as the story meanders, the sheer inventiveness and joy displayed in the writing shines through. If you head into this storm, know that it will be rollicking and gusty, with a few surprises blown your way.
July 18, 2022
I'm still not sure - intolerably brilliant, or brilliantly intolerable. I complain periodically - OK, often - about the failures of craft in some works that I read. Jack Livings is a master wordsmith, his sentences spilling on and on with a beautiful torrent of adjectives and subjunctive clauses. But, honest to heavens, he's exhausting and given to a near-endless array of pointless, gorgeously written diversions.
I have picked up and put down this book who knows how many times over the past two weeks, determined to finish it rather than chuck it out the window. (Throwing things out windows plays a very prominent role in the tome.)
The baroque excess of the plotting is extremely hard to boil down to simple declarative sentences. It's often not entirely clear who is the central character - the famed but deeply screwed up novelist; his damaged daughter; or their neighbor Albert Caldwell. Or Albert's son John. Together, they live at the Apelles, a huge Upper West Side apartment building clearly based on the city-block Apthorp.
We switch stories and characters, sometimes from chapter to chapter, on the night of the extraordinary blizzard of 1978. The ridiculously wealthy penthouse dwellers, the Vornados, throw an extravagant, decadent bash, a costume party with copious drinkings, drugs, dancing - and throwing furniture off the terrace. One of the guests may or may not also get thrown off the same terrace. The author is maddeningly elusive about what is happening, and sometimes even to whom.
People wander into the whiteout storm for various illogical reasons. They get into fights, or accidents, or go to the movies. It all seems utterly pointless, or confusing, or sometimes just inane. Honestly, I didn't care about or like anyone, which makes this all a slog as deep as the snow which blankets New York City.
Thank heavens The Blizzard is over.
I have picked up and put down this book who knows how many times over the past two weeks, determined to finish it rather than chuck it out the window. (Throwing things out windows plays a very prominent role in the tome.)
The baroque excess of the plotting is extremely hard to boil down to simple declarative sentences. It's often not entirely clear who is the central character - the famed but deeply screwed up novelist; his damaged daughter; or their neighbor Albert Caldwell. Or Albert's son John. Together, they live at the Apelles, a huge Upper West Side apartment building clearly based on the city-block Apthorp.
We switch stories and characters, sometimes from chapter to chapter, on the night of the extraordinary blizzard of 1978. The ridiculously wealthy penthouse dwellers, the Vornados, throw an extravagant, decadent bash, a costume party with copious drinkings, drugs, dancing - and throwing furniture off the terrace. One of the guests may or may not also get thrown off the same terrace. The author is maddeningly elusive about what is happening, and sometimes even to whom.
People wander into the whiteout storm for various illogical reasons. They get into fights, or accidents, or go to the movies. It all seems utterly pointless, or confusing, or sometimes just inane. Honestly, I didn't care about or like anyone, which makes this all a slog as deep as the snow which blankets New York City.
Thank heavens The Blizzard is over.
March 15, 2021
4.85 out of 5 stars! (I deducted 0.10 because there are no quotation marks around dialogue; this is usually a deal-breaker for me but the book is so good that I persevered; and I deducted 0.05 just because no book is perfect). This book is so good. I felt like I was at the February 1978 blizzard party in the Apelles apartment building and a part of its community - written so as to simultaneously be unbelievable larger than life characters and just regular "neighbors." I also recalled the feeling I had reading "Let the Great World Spin" wherein the August 1974 tightrope walk between the WTC towers is the epicenter and the characters' drama and dramas ripple out from there. I love it when books happen in New York City and use solitary seventies events as their epicenters. I wish every book could happen in New York City and use solitary seventies events as their epicenters. There are sentences in this book that will take your breath away. There is a world in this apartment building that you will wish you could inhabit but also be glad that you can be and remain an observer. Everyone is interesting and the circumstances which bring them together are ingenious.
June 3, 2021
I liked long stretches of this challenging read very much, particularly those focused on the people and happenings at a party of very well-to-do (and very blitzed on booze and drugs) New Yorkers on the night of a February blizzard in 1978 (some of which are laugh-out-loud funny in a slapstick kind of way) and those centered around the aged lawyer with a suicide plan and the novelist (father of the novel’s narrator) with an untold secret and neurotic fears. There are also long digressions with an assortment of characters somewhat tangentially or obliquely (Pynchonesquely?) connected to the main plot that range in time from World War II and the Holocaust through 9/11, with a lot of psychology (and psychohistory?) along the way. Though they are well written and all seems to come together at the end, some of these didn’t work so well for me. Somewhat reminiscent of Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, read last year, and Phillip Lewis’ The Barrowfields, read four years ago.
February 21, 2022
The Kirkus review says, while comparing it favorably to Tom Wolfe: An exuberant, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink pleasure. I’d agree with that.
My favorite quote: February, whore of a month... February was when everything died. Even January offered up empty blue skies, but February was a dark, Norse month of ice and cold. I’d definitely agree with that. With just another week to go, I can’t wait to see the back of this February, to welcome March and a Southern Spring.
On the night of February 6, 1978, an overwhelming nor'easter struck the city of New York. The lives of the people who live in an upscale, old fashioned apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan meet and cross, both knowingly and unknowingly, before, during and after it. The narrative skips back and forth in time. Which all sounds very confusing but I loved the way the author pulled it all together at the very end.
My favorite quote: February, whore of a month... February was when everything died. Even January offered up empty blue skies, but February was a dark, Norse month of ice and cold. I’d definitely agree with that. With just another week to go, I can’t wait to see the back of this February, to welcome March and a Southern Spring.
On the night of February 6, 1978, an overwhelming nor'easter struck the city of New York. The lives of the people who live in an upscale, old fashioned apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan meet and cross, both knowingly and unknowingly, before, during and after it. The narrative skips back and forth in time. Which all sounds very confusing but I loved the way the author pulled it all together at the very end.
June 2, 2021
February 6, 1978 – an intense blizzard hits NYC, and a varied cast of characters are drawn inevitably towards a tragic event that will have massive reverberations into the future, and reveal ties to the
past.
For much of the story, The Blizzard Party is presented in a meandering, rambling format that I did not find appealing. There were moments where the writing style was impressive, but many
more where it seemed to be trying way too hard to be erudite, and simply bogged down the reader in the inane. The final payout of the story thread was not worth the long, tedious journey that I had
to take; although the author does get some points for the occasional flashes of thought provoking and lyrically written segments.
This ARC was provided by Picador/Macmillan, in exchange for an honest review.
past.
For much of the story, The Blizzard Party is presented in a meandering, rambling format that I did not find appealing. There were moments where the writing style was impressive, but many
more where it seemed to be trying way too hard to be erudite, and simply bogged down the reader in the inane. The final payout of the story thread was not worth the long, tedious journey that I had
to take; although the author does get some points for the occasional flashes of thought provoking and lyrically written segments.
This ARC was provided by Picador/Macmillan, in exchange for an honest review.
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