Love, death & rare books A novel

Robert Hellenga, 1941-

Book - 2020

"Chas. Johnson & Sons, a venerated rare bookstore in urban Chicago, has been a family operation for three generations--grandfather, father and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop--and, in a sense restart his life--in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. Haunted his entire life by an obsession with a former lover, he finds her again only to be faced with yet another even more difficult challenge that threatens the well-being of the revival of the bookstore as well as the fate o...f his rekindled relationship."--Provided by publisher.

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Published
Encino, CA : Delphinium Books [2020]
Language
English
Main Author
Robert Hellenga, 1941- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
323 pages : illustration ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781883285852
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

I want to live life, not read about it." People keep saying that to Gabe Johnson and his father, Charles, bookmen of the old school, who along with Gabe's grandfather, Charles, Sr., ran a rare-book store in Chicago's Hyde Park until the internet finally forced Gabe to close the doors of the family business. As Gabe tells his story, from 1970, when his mother disappeared (after first stating her preference for living over reading), to 2011, when Gabe, in his fifties, attempts to assess his life in and out of books, Hellenga returns to the theme that has permeated his eight deeply moving and meditative novels: love and loss. Most of the loving and losing in Gabe's life concerns a fellow booklover, Olivia, with whom he falls in love in college and who leaves and returns to his life multiple times over decades. Books, too, appear to be lost after the store is sold, but Gabe can't quit them, leaving Chicago to buy a ramshackle house on Lake Michigan and then starting a new store, smaller in scale and, yes, supported by a website. All of Hellenga's novels revel in the details of their protagonists' occupations, and this one is no different: it is an ode to physical books, their smell and feel, but also to the idea of both living life and reading about it, not choosing one over the other.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hellenga's clunky, heavy-handed tale (after The Truth About Death) centers on a rare bookshop in Chicago's Hyde Park. Gabe Johnson grows up around books in the 1970s, spending his time at the shop owned by his father and grandfather after his mother abandons the family when he is 12. After Gabe learns the business, his father, Charles, encourages a romance with Olivia, a young woman who works with them. Though the two become involved, "melting into each other's dreams" while reading Keats and Wordsworth, Olivia disappears only to resurface numerous times throughout his life. In 1989, five years after Olivia's first departure, the bookshop's window display of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses is hit with a Molotov cocktail and a pregnant Olivia shows up at the scene. Though the shop is spared, Hellenga squeezes the attack along with the subsequent discovery of a pipe bomb for maximum narrative portent. Unexpectedly called to the maternity ward as the "father" of Olivia's newborn, Gabe holds the child with a sense of dread over their future and that of the shop. As the plot moves forward to include the 21st-century realities of internet competition, Gabe finds he can still depend on love and death. This romance falls short of the poetry that inspires its characters. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Hellenga's episodic novel traces the fortunes of a family-owned bookshop and the lives it touches.Chas. Johnson Son, Ltd., a purveyor of used and collectible books, is a pillar of its Hyde Park neighborhood, near the University of Chicago. Gabriel, the third generation of the Johnson book dynasty, begins work as a teenager in the shop alongside his grandfather Chaz and father, Charles Jr. Beginning in 1970, in each chapter the action jumps ahead by days, months, or years. We learn about the rare book trade, auctions, the appraisal process, and the escalating price wars as private collectors passionate about books are outbid by billionaires seeking just another trophy. Milestones in American bookselling are checked off. Johnson's is one of the many bookstores to be bombed for stocking The Satanic Verses. The juggernaut of big-box bookselling rolls over independent storesand then comes Amazonbut, still, Johnson's endures. Only the increasing movement of the collectible book trade to online sales deals the death blow. Meanwhile, Gabe grows up and grows older. His mother deserted the family long before; and his first love, Olivia, deserts Gabe for Yale, where an affair with a professor leaves her pregnant. Olivia will return to give birth to daughter Saskia and, later, to manage the Hyde Park Borders store, but whenever Gabe's romantic hopes rise, she dashes them. Now in his 50s, Gabe, who has never married, sells everything and buys a house teetering on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Then Borders' bankruptcy and Olivia's own belated maturity take a hand. Partly owing to a supporting cast of colorful eccentrics, including Father Gregory, desperate to unload the library of a defunct Catholic college; Delilah, scion of a funeral home chain; and Augie, a garrulous elderly former gangster, the story ambles along amiably, never failing to instruct and, somewhat less often, entertain. Gabe never fully emerges as a character since his role is principally that of a spectator to the lives of others as well as his own.A novel with the feel of a rambling memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.