Sinatraland - Hardcover

Kashner, Sam

2.96

26 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0879519177 ISBN 13: 9780879519179

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 1999

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By turns riotous and poignant, Sam Kashner’s Sinatraland introduces a remarkable character, and a talented new writer, to contemporary American fiction.

Sam Kashner’s darkly brilliant first novel tells the story of “Finkie” Finkelstein, businessman from New Jersey, and lovingly obsessed fan of Frank Sinatra. To Finkie, Frank is the model of a man: elegant, sophisticated, talented, with charm to spare. All of Finkle’s decisions, his choice of house (“the largest home in Fort Lee. The real estate agent told me it briefly belonged to Buddy Hacket”), the name of his daughter (Nancy Ava, after Sinatra’s first two wives), are made with Frank in mind. Now if only he could let Frank know how much he means to him...Through a series of unanswered letters to his idol, Finkie’s life unfolds, a life where Sinatra is center stage while all the rest takes a backseat. In Sinatraland, Finkie’s trials are numerous: a failing marriage; a strained relationship with both his daughter and his brother; an ill-fated affair with an office co-worker, but as long as Frank comes out with a new record or film, there's always hope. And indeed, Finkie’s life takes an extraordinary turn when he attends the Chairman’s famed “farewell” concert in 1971, an experience that is proof positive of his belief. “It's a crazy world, Francis, is it not?”

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About the Author:

Sam Kashner teaches writing at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. An acclaimed biographer and poet, he is author of A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant, Hollywood Kryptonite and several books of poetry, and has written for numerous publications including GQ and Vanity Fair. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife, the writer Nancy Schoenberger. This is his first novel.

Review:

Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Uncommonly original and engaging...a smart, funny, knowing novel about what it's like to be a certain kind of American man.

Mark Rozzo Los Angeles Times If you were still with us, Frank, you'd sleep the sleep of kings knowing that the art of book writing is safe in [Sam Kashner's] hands.

Robert Taylor The Boston Globe Quirky...intelligent...very funny.

James Ellory Ring-a-ding! Sinatraland is the postmortem on Frank Sinatra. Sam Kashner pokes, probes, dissects, and undermines the myth and takes us on a deep dunk into the sewer of American pop culture. This is an indictment of the Voice and a gorgeously wrought hymn to the finger-popping twentieth-century loser.

Madison Smartt Bell Sam Kashner's first novel is weirder than it sounds, but with wit and charm to match its strangeness. By turns hilarious, perverse, surreal, and genuinely touching, Sinatraland is what one might call an incomparable debut.

Helen Schulman author of The Revisionist Smart, humorous, original, Sam Kashner's Sinatraland deftly explores the peculiarly tragic aspects of an obsession with a celebrity -- the celebrity, Sinatra -- in a moving, romantic, epistolary, tour de force.

Robert Plunket author of My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie Regardless of how you feel about Frank Sinatra you will gleefully devour Sinatraland. It's the Old Blue Eyes legend writ small, transferred to the oddly romantic life of "Finkie" Finkelstein. Harrowing, sad, and very funny, it charts the darker and more complex corners of the twentieth-century male psyche.

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