Penthouse F

Central Park West Trilogy #2

by Richard Kalich

This novel, by the author of the renowned Charlie P , takes the form of an inquiry into the suicide—or murder?—of a young boy and girl in the penthouse of a writer named Richard Kalich. Is Kalich (also the author of the book) responsible? The reader must decide! A frighteningly comic tale.

227 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Richard Kalich was born in New York and grew up on the Upper West Side. He's the author of The Nihilesthete (1987), Charlie P (2005), and Penthouse F (2010), published in 2014 in a single volume as Central Park West Trilogy, which encapsulates Kalich’s uncompromising examination of the state of modern life, as well as his metafictional experimentations with form and language. His later works include The Assisted Living Facility Library (2019) and A Man Made Long Ago (2021). He has been nominated for the National Book Award and for a Pulitzer Prize.

Reviews

[George]

“- Do you have a question?

– Mr. Kalich, after cultivating and taking such great pains to build up the boy and girl’s relationship, provide them with home and shelter, warmth and succor, as you say—what possessed you, other than the compunction to follow your would-be novel’s inexorable plottings, to destroy what you built?

– You’ve answered your own question.”

Similar in structure to Robert Pinget’s The Inquisitory or Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools, Penthouse F is mostly in the form of an interrogation. Richard Kalich is the suspect but we also hear the testimonies of many people in Kalich’s life, including the most ancillary characters, from his former flames and his literary agent to the doorman and his fellow tenants, not to mention Kalich’s twin brother, Robert Kalich, and the street book vendor. Basically everyone except Kalich’s eyelash mites.

Read the full review of the trilogy, as well as the unofficial coda to the trilogy, here: https://thecollidescope.com/2022/05/2...

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old (ever-relevant) questions of image and reality, virtuality, and the sadist-victim-voyeur triangle dance again in this compact, vicious novel. In proper meta-form (ie, like the Pompidou Center, with its innards displayed exterior), the novel contains the notes of its own construction, typed decades before, and exists in a constant self-reflexive limbo, a unflinching self-interrogation. Aren't we always our own harshest inquisitors?

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extreme metafictioneering is afoot as author namesake Richard Kalich, the narrator and resident of Penthouse F, is interrogated over his involvement with a homeless boy and girl whom he lures to his apartment in order to perform psychological experiments on while he watches via camera from a secret viewing room in his closet. The book consists of the interrogation transcript of Kalich and other witnesses interspersed with Kalich's own narration, notes from Kalich's failed novel manuscript that first prompted his interest in the boy and girl, and documents such as memos and pay stubs from Kalich's long-time position as a caseworker with the New York Human Resources Administration, from which he is now retired. This is a fast-paced read that ruminates on the blurring of lines between creator and creation; the creative process as a whole; issues of personal identity, particularly as pertaining to writers; and the concept of virtual reality and what is 'real' versus 'fiction,' among other themes. That is a lot to be crammed into such a short read, and as a result I feel a bit dizzy after the few hours I took to plow through it.

[Paolo Tampieri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Davvero troppo cinico troppo triste, è sicuramente ben scritto ma per arrivare i fondo ho dovuto davvero sfidare il mio stomaco che a tratti mi diceva di mollare, non amo non finire i libri ma questa è stata davvero una sfida.
Ho altri 2 suoi libri ma non so se lo affronterò mai