Crazy sorrow

In Passaro's ambitious second novel (after Violence, Nudity, Adult Content), four decades of American life are explored through two characters who meet on July 4, 1976, as America celebrates its bicentennial. As fireworks burst over Lower Manhattan, Columbia student George Langland, almost 20, meets Barnard student Anna Goff, and they begin an intense but short-lived affair. The novel tracks their separate paths as Anna becomes a high-powered attorney with a white shoe firm and George drifts from job to job until he partners with Burke, who owns a coffee truck and has a vision, which he ultimately turns into an empire of 2,670 coffee bars, making himself and George incredibly wealthy in the process. Both George and Anna marry, divorce, and have numerous relationships with men and women, but they never entirely forget one another until chance finally throws them together again in 2000. Passaro uses George and Anna and their friends--Arthur, a photographer, and Louis, a playwright who writes an Angels in America--like play about AIDS--to dramatize the changes in American life from the 1970s to the present. Filled with memorable scenes and characters, this has plenty of pithy things to say about sex, love, and relationships. The result is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. (Sept.)

A tale of two New Yorkers across five decades of love, money, sex, and death. Passaro's second novel, following Violence, Nudity, Adult Content (2001), centers on the shifting fortunes of George and Anna, who meet as college students in 1976. Their romance is short-lived, but though they pursue different relationships and career paths over the years, they never quite fall out of each other's orbit. After false starts as a journalist and carnival-ride operator, George stumbles into a job running a coffee shop and becomes the co-owner of a Starbucks-style mega-chain. Anna, meanwhile, heads to law school and spends years dissatisfied with work and men--until George reemerges, divorced, as if fated. ("They would not, this time, just glance off each other like two molecules in a heated system. They would stick.") As he tracks that time, Passaro crafts a novel that's very Manhattan in its particulars, with fine-grained descriptions of the World Trade Center and people lining up to buy the Village Voice to get a jump on apartment listings. But he's also big-theme hunting, exploring the ways money shapes character, how sex binds or wrecks relationships, and how we endure and survive grief. (The mention of the twin towers on Page 1 all but sounds an airhorn to let us know that theme is surely coming.) Passaro writes exquisitely at every turn, narrating with an engaging worldly-wise tone. But the novel is also curiously centerless; its leads march through sexual abuse, breakups, bad jobs, and even 9/11 so implacably that the novel feels less about human beings than victims (or beneficiaries) of fickle fate. The novel's epic sweep is ambitious, but the emotional intensity of the characters gets somewhat smothered amid it. Passaro's widescreen storytelling strives to cover everything, almost to a fault. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.