Now You See Him [Paperback]

NOW YOU SEE HIM is a book about loss; not just loss of a friend or sibling, but about loss of self.

Nick, the narrator, was always proud of his status as Rob Costner's special friend. Rob was cool, a cult-writer, a minor celebrity in New York city; whereas Nick was the one that remained behind - a small town man with a respectable job - watching Rob's glamorous life from a distance.

Then, one day, Rob dies and Nick cannot adjust to the bereavement. Everything - his marriage, his relationship with his parents and his children - begins to unravel as he seeks solace in his other endearing memory of childhood - Rob's sister, the luscious Belinda.

The interplay between these two characters is touching in the extreme. Like Nick, Belinda is hurting at her brother's death, and the way Eli Gottlieb portrays this is as terse as it is beautiful.

What makes great fiction, as far as I'm concerned, is a recognition of truth. 'That's it!' I want to say, 'That's it, exactly.' And I think Eli Gottlieb captures exactly that feeling of uncomprehending disbelief we all have when someone close to us dies.

That is one aspect of their relationship, but this is counterbalanced with moments of hilarity.

As well as having an ear for dialogue Eli Gottlieb also has an artist's eye for those small nuances that define character, and deftly paints them with the lightest touch:

'The doctor tapped his forefingers together in a gesture that signalled either thoughtfulness or applause while a single eyebrow, with astonishing independence from its twin, rose and fell...'

Apart from the quality of the writing, I also liked the overall structure of this book - the way it unfolded in the present and in the past, one interleaving with the other until the history of both Nick and Rob is revealed. And that history turns out to be an entanglement that is just as satisfyingly complicated as the narrative itself.

It's an engrossing read, a page-turner, reminding me of the writing of people like Richard Ford and Patrick Gale, and I highly recommend it.

Marital infidelity and murder, a loving childhood friendship, and the struggling life of the artist reverberate through this overwhelmingly desolate novel that pulls back all of the layers of emotion of one ordinary man and reaches into the darkest areas of the human heart. The suicidal death of well-known Monarch short story writer Rob Caster is tragedy that leaves his best child-hood friend Nick Framingham forever damaged.

Nick would never had imagined that Rob would have taken such desperate measures, his last days filled with incessant sociopathic and literary ramblings as he shoots his girlfriend Kate Pierce through the head while she lays in bed in her apartment in Manhattan and then commits suicide the day after. When the deed is done, the collateral damage and the ensuring national media storm is almost too much for Nick to bear.

While the literary community is absolutely roiled by the murder, mobilizing to mourn Rob, and everyone who had actually known Rob is left to walk around with a strange lifted feeling, "like a freshening wind blowing." Nick, however is left absolutely stunned by his friend's death, and then doubly shocked by the extent of the pain it brings with it in the form of a sharp ache way up inside that hadn't been touched in years.

Not only has Nick lost his best childhood mate, but he must also face the ramifications that - although he doesn't know it at the time - Rob's death will be part of the beginning of his new life. Left with the ghost of Rob, forming the words "question authority," Nick is left to sort out the detritus of Rob's shattered life just before he committed this shocking act.

Nick's wife, Lucy is far less than interested in sharing his bereavement. She'd never quite trusted the "wildness" of Nick's best friend, or liked hearing his stories. Nick is mystified at the vehemence of my wife's disgust; after all, he was a deep friend, and "part of the landscape of ancient memory." To be sure, Nick thrived on telling Lucy over a glass of wine and his two young sons Dwight and Will the passionate life of his friend and the spectacular scrapes they had gotten into together over the years.

The question remains: why did Rob become so vulnerable and willfully assert his own and Kate's destruction? Was it Kate's bourgeoning friendship with the seemingly villainous David Framkin, a bald-headed fifty's corporate raider who had offered to bankroll Kate's career? Or was it her mysterious aloofness and her untouchable composure that seemed to entrance the many men who wooed her?

In the days following the murder, no one ever talked about how much he loved her and no one spoke about how deeply attached to her he was, or how he began to feel himself literally shrinking as her literary celebrity began to grow. But certainly Rob's death is a catalyst for Nick, and for Lucy, who believes that Rob's demise has set off in her husband a strange emotional contraction and a "new wave of withdrawal" that gradually creeps unopposed into the very heart of their marital bed.

It doesn't help that Rob's seductive sister Belinda is back in Monarch, trying to reconnect with Nick, even as she mourns her brother. An ex-rock and roll singer, Belinda a "bomb dropper by nature." Blunt, confrontational, and indifferent, and also possessed with a drop dead volatility, Nick finds himself increasingly attracted to this deeply sexual woman who had always been unembarrassed about her body, even as his wife begins to shut him out, ultimately threatened by Belinda's wildness and the way it attacks the codes by which Lucy has tried to run her life.

When an old yearbook that jumpstarts Nick's journey into his past life with Rob, the story begins to alternate between the boys' childhood with their adult existences, laying out the case for what Rob had bought into Nick's life, this sense of fearlessness and going for it no matter what the odds. Growing up together, their world was filled with love and neighborly good intentions, especially that of Nick's mom and the glamorous Shirley Caster who tries to sabotage Nick's life with a dreaded family secret.

Events take a turn for the worse in the months after Rob's death. Nick starts lying to Lucy, embellishing falsehood, with the truth becoming almost like an enemy just as Belinda slithers back into his life, "in a rush of silky fabric, high heels and innuendo." Drawn with a razor sharp attention to detail, Gottlieb unwraps the film of civility and graciousness, exposing the darkest reaches passion and sexuality. The friendship of Rob and Nick is central to this compelling tale as the author steadily retraces the events that led up to that fateful day, imbuing his narrative with a sense of tragic inevitability.

This book is about the power of the artist to live in his own imagination, the surrender to the slavery of sex and how twin paths in the form of a childhood friendship can lead all the way back to the beginning of shared time. Nick is certainly blindsided by Rob's exit, his friend's death helping speed the ruin of his marriage, estrange him from his children, send his father to hospital, and drive a stake through the heart of his relationship with his mother.

All is drenched in collateral damage and everyone is a victim, the characters fervently yearning for something that they just can't have in this riveting and beautifully written work of literary of literary fiction. Mike Leonard February 08.

This is one of the best books I have read for a long time. It is beautifully written, observes human nature so well that I just didn't want to put it down. I recommend it to anyone with any sensitivity, who's ever had great friendships or loved someone.