Review by New York Times Review
Certain kinds of beauty need to come in small doses, and the smallness of Gerard's debut novel seems essential to a book that burns very hot. The story follows the collapsing love affair of two disaffected 20-somethings living apart, interspersed with flashbacks to their abysmal road trip around America the previous winter. He is an alcoholic; she's anorexic. He's a vegan anarchist sponging off his parents; she's a self-destructive astronomy student ducking her mother. He's an unbearable jerk, and she is someone who puts up with an unbearable jerk. They are messed-up, unlikable people moving through a bleak landscape, and what gives Gerard's account of them its terrific intensity is that it contains almost nothing else. There's barely any setting, a minimal plot. There's no real effort to make the characters sympathetic. The prose is simple (declarative flat description, stripped-down dialogue), and it relates mostly excruciating stuff, distilled moments of despair and dislocation. Interposed with these moments are astronomical facts about the deaths of stars (the book's central metaphor) and lists of the products, medications, celebrities and other consumer dreck that envelop these characters' lives, eclipsing the larger world that surrounds healthier people. The particular genius of "Binary Star" is that out of such grim material it constructs beauty. It's like a novel-shaped poem about addiction, codependence and the relentlessness of the everyday, a kind of elegy of emptiness. MARTIN RIKER teaches in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A teacher in training struggles with anorexia and a troubled relationship in this fast-moving debut novel in verse by Gerard (author of the chapbook Things I Told My Mother). The unnamed narrator, who weighs 98 pounds at the story's outset, thinks about her hunger, fear, guilt, and personal disgust while reflecting on her tumultuous long-distance relationship with her alcoholic lover, John. She recalls the previous winter when she and John drove along the perimeter of the continental United States. The narrative follows the couple's journey northwest from John's apartment in Chicago, south down the Pacific coast, east across the South, and north alongside the Atlantic. As their respective compulsions grow increasingly out of control, their relationship begins to resemble a dying star. Gerard's spare and methodical prose mirrors the narrator's obsessiveness. Many passages read like concise notes taken at an astronomy lecture, and the narrator speeds through the events and dialogue of her road trip with John, listing details rather than describing them. The pages catalogue consumption: what characters eat and drink, what they read, what pills they take and how often. The cold distance of the protagonist's tone also complements the form of the book and its allusions to outer space. Gerard has produced a powerful, poetic, and widely relatable novel that eludes easy classification. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"A binary star is a system containing two stars that orbit their common center of mass," proclaims the nameless narrator of this incandescent first novel. She's seriously anorexic, circling an alcoholic lover, and the pithy, streaming, verbally one-upping narrative recalls an extended road trip they took, where they try to help each other without much success. VERDICT Not your standard read, this book is recommended for anyone (including ambitious YAs) interested in an intense, spot-on investigation of destructive behavior and a damaged and damaging relationship. (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
