The Sky Below [Hardcover]

Stacey d'Erasmo writes about ordinary people in a style and manner far from kitchen sink realism and run-of-the-mill prose, taking the reader through her characters' inner and outer journeys in a subtle and imaginative way that makes every one of them stand out as a unique being with his or her unique destiny. (Like every one of us, I might add.)

In "The Sky Below", everyday events takes on a mythic luster. Together with the author's sense of language and metaphor it makes this tale a riveting read.

d'Erasmo is an accomplished prose writer and a wise lady. I also enjoyed her two earlier novels, "Tea" and "A Seahorse Year immensely.

This novel received a lot of praise from the press but I found the novel frustratingly soulless. Gabriel the main protaganist lurches from one thing to the next in an incomprehensible manner. The novel charts his progress from an eight year old boy in Massachusetts, to Florida, Arizona, New York and Mexico. His character changes with each location. Obviously D'Erasmo's phantasmagoric style appeals to some but I found the novel cold and uninspiring and for a non American depressingly tedious reading about a country and people without soul or substance.

A selfish and manipulate cad is the narrator of The Sky Below, a drama that centers on the spiritual and emotional development of Gabriel Collins, a sexually ambiguous young man who spends much of his life haunted by the sudden disappearance of his father from their home in Bishop, Massachusetts. An artist, Gabriel's early life is shadowed by his mother's tales of mythological gods, especially that of Tereus, a half-bird, half-warrior and her bottles of food coloring and their symphony of blue and red in the kitchen sink. With no money and mired in debt, the family leave for Florida where Gabriel and his older sister Caroline help their mother run The Sunburst, a rundown motel, in front of a two-lane highway.

While mother takes charge of the motel with a vengeance, preoccupied with just trying to scrape out a living, Gabriel soon learns the monetary value of sex, pleasuring strange men at bust station bathrooms and sell drugs with his best school friend, the overweight Jenny with her cherry-red windbreaker. But for Gabriel life at the Sunburst feels like purgatory, "a hot scrubby drive to nowhere" and he aches for his life back in Bishop, where his masterpiece, The City was made from opened Christmas boxes, and torn wrapping paper and murals. A type of mythical beast that gradually grows and metamorphoses, Gabriel's life gradually becomes a series of allegorical boxes. Even as he remains caught in his Dad's enormous, spectral grip, his transistor radio the only remnants that his dad ever existed, the scrappy dollar notes and the stolen trinkets kept in shoe boxes under the bed, eventually jumpstart Gabriel's new life in Manhattan.

Living in an apartment in 7th street and working near to the Stock Exchange, and the shadowy blocks in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Gabriel meets the aging author Fluer, and helps her write her Stolen Girls series of books, while his freezer steadily fills with nice, cold, foil-wrapped bricks of money, courtesy of his new and wealthy benefactor. A natural schemer, Gabriel is confronted with enormous challenges, especially the affordability of a house on Pineapple street that he'd always wanted and was sure he was going to get. It's also not surprising then that the inevitable occurs making him question his relationship with his wealthy lover Janos and the strangely inappropriate intimate friendship with his best friend Sarah who leaves him for a puppeteer.

Heavily symbolic, this novel is about one man's spiritual journey as he tries to find a place for himself in the world. Gabriel's trajectory through New York and then onto Ixtlan, Mexico is loaded with surprises. Discontented, disconnected, and even vengeful, Gabe is not a very likeable character. And it is his internal battles that emotionally drain the reader even as a rare form of cancer, like a lion roars through him, his life becoming like a series of fractuals, each fragmenting into kaleidoscopic parts, some vivid, some murky, some jagged, and all consecutively plummeting, changing and whirling. D'erasmo's prose proves is as dense and as multi-colored as the constantly shifting skies that mirror Gabriel's life like some vast motion of which Gabe can only see a small part. While the final section in Ixtlan goes on a bit long, this novel is mostly a gorgeously evocative account of one man's lonely struggles as Gabriel, seduced by love and creativity, tries to fervently resolve his emotional inner demons. Mike Leonard March 2009.