The Reconstructionist: A Novel - Softcover

Arvin, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061995169 ISBN 13: 9780061995163

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2012

Synopsis

In a gripping novel of secrets and survival from an acclaimed, emerging literary voice, the collision between a budding forensic investigator, his tormented mentor, and the haunted woman who emerges from the wreckage of his past will have fateful results for all. Following his collection In the Electric Eden and the novel Articles of War, Nick Arvin’s The Reconstructionist is both a page-turning thriller and a powerful novel of character, with shades of Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Fascinating and yet disturbing, redemptive and yet bleak, The Reconstructionist is like no other book today—while its timeless themes of damage and growth, decisiveness and responsibility, will echo far into the future.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: You wouldn't think that earning a pair of mechanical engineering degrees would lend itself to fine literature, but Nick Arvin is an exception: His thoughtful, offbeat, original sophomore novel, The Reconstructionist, has a caliber as unexpected as its author's. Antihero Ellis Barstow, whose half brother Christopher died young in a car crash, makes his living by conducting auto accident postmortems. He also loves his boss's wife, who--not coincidentally--was Christopher's high school girlfriend. It sounds complicated, but in the end all these likably flawed people are just trying to answer the same two questions: What happened? And whose fault was it? --Mia Lipman

From the Back Cover:

One instant can change an entire lifetime.

As a boy, Ellis Barstow heard the sound of the collision that killed Christopher, his older half brother—an accident that would haunt him for years. A decade later, searching for purpose after college, Ellis takes a job as a forensic reconstructionist, investigating and re-creating the details of fatal car accidents—under the guidance of the irascible John Boggs, who married Christopher's girlfriend. Ellis takes naturally to the work, fascinated by the task of trying to find reason, and justice, within the seemingly random chaos of smashed glass and broken lives. But Ellis is harboring secrets of his own—not only his memory of the car crash that killed his brother but also his feelings for Boggs's wife, Heather, which soon lead to a full-blown affair. And when Boggs inexplicably disappears, Ellis sets out to find him . . . and to try to make sense of the crash site his own life has become.

Raising a host of universal questions—Can science ever explain matters of the heart? Can we ever escape the gravitational pull of the past?—Nick Arvin's novel is at once deeply moving and compulsively readable.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0061995169
• ISBN 13: 9780061995163
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 329