Elysiana - Hardcover

Chris Knopf

3.19

93 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579621988 ISBN 13: 9781579621988

Publisher: Permanent Press, 2010

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Gwendalynn Anders, a mid-Western girl who's never seen the ocean, wonders what was in that joint she smoked a week before waking up on Elysiana, and why it feels like the trip will last the entire summer of 1969.

Jack Halcyon, living atop an abandoned twenty-story hotel, wonders how he's able to ponder the incongruities of life after leaving a big chunk of his brain at the scene of an accident.

Borough Council President Norman Harlan wonders what cruel God put him on an equal footing with Avery Volpe, the fearsome Captain of the Beach Patrol.

Twelve miles long and a mile wide, Elysiana is an island off the coast of New Jersey sitting astride the convergence of powerful fault lines social, political, and existential. It's a place of beauty and insanity, shared by the angelic and profane. Where cops, criminals, prodigies, and the promiscuous find themselves at the haphazard mercy of a lunatic providence.

Other players include a globe-trotting whiz kid, an Italo-Hispanic crime boss, a surfing aesthete and his vulgar roommate, a career car stereo thief, and a seven-year-old girl who's probably spent too much time with the dead bodies in the dunes.

This is a story that could have only happened on the Jersey Shore during the summer of 69. A time when the social fabric was tearing apart, in a place where that fabric had never been very well knit together.

Elysiana is both a fabulist's look at a lost time and place and a hurtling thriller. It's a tale of two types of transition the

personal and the grand. All played out within the isolated magic of a barrier island.

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About the Author:

CHRIS KNOPF is the award winning author of the highly acclaimed Sam Acquillo Hamptons mystery series: The Last Refuge, Two Time, Head Wounds, and Hard Stop. As a young college student he worked as a lifeguard in Avalon on the South Jersey shore, a place not unlike the setting for Elysiana. A sailor, cabinet maker, and advertising executive at Mintz & Hoke in Avon, Connecticut, he and his wife Mary also spend considerable time at their Southampton, Long Island home.

Review:

As the 1969 summer season begins on the New Jersey barrier island of Elysiana an assortment of seashore amenities and profound dissociation the cops and the lifeguards prepare for the annual turf war made necessary by a loopy municipal charter and warring city politicians. A druglord arrives in his GTO to murder a local who stiffed him. A drugged-out Chicago girl figuratively washes up on the beach with no clear memory of how she got there, and a local thief and surfer marvels at the ease of stealing eight-track tape players from cars. A full baker's dozen major characters swirl and collide as if in Brownian motion, moved by elemental forces like wind and tide and lesser things like work and whim. Signs and portents hint that something life changing, if not quite apocalyptic, will affect them all.

Elysiana is a departure for Knopf, whose Sam Acquillo mysteries have won reviewers raves, but he nails it. The seemingly shambling plot proves ultimately to be sly, and Knopf's sweet-spirited style recalls memories spurred by faded home movies of long-ago vacations. His bio says that he was a New Jersey lifeguard back in the day, and he captures the zeitgeist of the Shore perfectly. Every shoobie on the beach who eschews MTV's odious Jersey Shore should be reading Elysiana this season.
Thomas Gaughan -- --Booklist, starred review

Smart dialogue and sharp social observations distinguish this stand-alone thriller from Knopf (Short Squeeze and four other Hamptons mysteries). In the summer of 1969, life on the sunny New Jersey resort island of Elysiana simmers as town cops feud with the beach patrol, fed-up wives elude their slimy husbands, local politicians double-cross each other, lots of dope flows everywhere, and various needy, wounded people such as a brain-damaged lifeguard, a young woman from Chicago who fled her lecherous dad, and a smalltime criminal who's also a maniac surfer look for reasons to go on. Knopf sets up a lot of competing characters capable of semiclever scheming to get what they want, then shows a massive hurricane ripping their plans and their island apart. Like John D. Macdonald or Charles Willeford in a lighter mood, he's unsentimentally fond of his characters and tentatively hopeful about their ability to salvage something from the wreckage around them --Publishers Weekly

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