Starred review from April 2, 2012
Poet and English professor Kiefer features, in his smart first novel, Capt. Keith Corcoran, “genius” mathematician, engineer, and astronaut working aboard the International Space Station, who discovers during his deployment that his 16-year-old daughter has died in a car wreck and his wife, embroiled in an affair, wants a divorce. Once back on the ground, Keith takes an indefinite vacation from NASA while battling recurring migraines and his sudden solitude, and hanging out at the local Starbucks, where he befriends Peter Kovalenko, an impetuous Ukrainian former astronomer presently working at Target. The two alienated men soon bond and share their various misfortunes while smoking pot, drinking beer, and stargazing through Peter’s telescope in an abandoned suburban lot. The bereft Keith divorces his wife, puts the house on the market, and strikes up his own sordid tryst with his promiscuous married neighbor, Jennifer. Keith’s stasis and confusion stem, in part, from his uncertain job status, but his newfound relationships enable him to strive toward a self that will persevere and survive his losses. Though occasionally rambling, this is an astute, impressive, and ambitious debut. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Markson Thoma Literary Agency.
Starred review from July 1, 2012
In Kiefer's debut literary novel, astronaut Keith Corcoran returns from the International Space Station to a house populated by a bare mattress, random canned goods and a gray leather sofa. The astronaut's beloved and gifted daughter is dead after a car accident, and his wife has left him, all while he spent months aboard the ISS. In a house in an economy-stalled suburb, Corcoran contemplates his world, and he is haunted by his near-metaphysical, unquantifiable experience in space. Corcoran's life has always been measured by the fluidity of equations (he's a math genius), which he believes can explain nearly everything. Now the numbers no longer add up. Empathetically drawn by Kiefer, Corcoran is a splendid protagonist, isolated from his lifelong ambition to be an astronaut by grief and migraines. "Everything in his life had telescoped into guilt and bereavement and a kind of emptiness he still did not entirely understand." Kiefer also develops an imaginative and intriguing cast of characters: Barb, Corcoran's wife, who initially supported the ambitious and driven man she married; Quinn, Corcoran's daughter, the first in his world who also saw numbers as colors, as having emotions and characters; and Jennifer, the neighbor with whom he has a brief and unsatisfying affair. Most compelling are Peter and Luda, Ukrainian immigrants, lost in America's consumer culture. Peter grieves for his former profession as an astronomy technician, and Luda, quiet and beautiful, displays a moral intelligence that may right Corcoran's world. Kiefer's work is deeply symbolic, with Corcoran's appreciation for the order and perfection to be found in equations and algorithms being contrasted against the chaos and entropy of his personal life. The narrative is straightforward and masterfully accomplished. A wonderfully executed debut novel, so rich as to inspire rereading, right down to its inevitable resolution, both ironic and existentialist.
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Starred review from June 1, 2012
Numbers speak to Keith Corcoran much more clearly than to other humans. A mathematician, engineer, and astronaut, his first mission to the International Space Station is a triumph. But back on beautiful Earth, so small and precious, cruel subtractions occur. Keith's teenage daughter dies in an accident, and his wife leaves him. His shock and grief manifest as hellish migraines that threaten his glorious career. First-time novelist Kiefer tracks his stoic protagonist's plunge into a sea of confusion, chaos, and despair with a shimmering lexicon of fractals, space travel, and physics as well as a piquantly metaphorical sense of place. Unable to access or express his own feelings, let alone decipher those of others, Keith finds himself exiled on a suburban cul-de-sac in his empty house, which, like him, looks sound but is slowly being destroyed from within. Drawn into the struggles of his neighbors, including a Ukrainian immigrant longing for work in his chosen field of astronomy, Keith is forced to perform the painful calculus of his losses. Within a belabored yet nonetheless involving tragicomic plot, Kiefer illuminates the nature of a mathematical mind, depicts a dire failure of familial empathy, and translates emotions into cosmic and algorithmic phenomena of startling beauty and profound resonance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)