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Summary
Summary
From the critically acclaimed author of Be Safe I Love You comes a dark and breathtaking novel of love, friendship, and survival set in the red light district of Athens in the 1980s that Garth Greenwall calls "a ferocious, brilliant book."
Running brings together an ensemble of outsiders who get by as "runners"--hustlers who sell tourists on low-end accommodations for a small commission and a place to stay.
Bridey Sullivan, a young American woman who has fled a peculiar and traumatic upbringing in Washington State, takes up with a queer British couple, the poet Milo Rollack and Eton drop-out Jasper Lethe. Slipping in and out of homelessness, addiction, and under-the-table jobs, they create their own kind of family as they struggle to survive.
Jasper's madness and consequent death frame a narrative of emotional intensity. In its midst this trio become linked to an act of terrorism. The group then splinters, taking us from Athens to the cliffs of the Mediterranean, and to modern-day New York.
Whether in the red light district of Athens or in the world of fire jumpers in the Pacific Northwest, we are always in a space of gorgeously wrought otherness. Running shows novelist Cara Hoffman to be writing at the peak of her craft.
Author Notes
Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novels So Much Pretty, Be Safe I Love You, and now, Running . She lives in New York City.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hoffman's excellent third novel (after Be Safe I Love You) follows acclaimed poet and professor Milo Rollock as he reminisces about his unscrupulous youth in Greece and the people who still haunt him. After leaving his working-class neighborhood to try and make a living as a boxer, Milo falls for Eton dropout Jasper Lethe. The two survive in Athens in the 1980s by working the local trains, goading tourists into staying in disreputable hotels. Nomadic Bridey Sullivan, an American teenager who was raised in the woods by her survivalist uncle, becomes their friend and lover. In the present, as a middle-aged man teaching creative writing in New York City, Milo sees himself in his talented student Tiffany Navas, but he is otherwise dismayed by his bourgeois existence. He moved to the U.S. in an attempt to reconnect with Bridey, who was pregnant when he last saw her. Jasper's sociopathic and destructive tendencies long ago, including the fallout of a scam he masterminded that destroyed the reputation of a friend of Bridey's, long ago sealed Jasper's fate. Hoffman beautifully conveys the depths of Milo's longing as well the personalities of his motley crew. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Hoffman (Be Safe I Love You, 2014) centers her newest novel on a young American woman, Bridey, who's living in Athens in the 1980s and working as a runner, convincing unsuspecting tourists to stay in a dingy hotel for a cut of the deal. The work is dirty, dangerous, and most times drunken, and Bridey immediately falls in with fellow runners Milo and Jasper, an English couple who welcome her into their life and bed. A moneymaking prank soon goes awry, causing a detonation that disperses the three. Chapters alternate from Bridey's first-person narration of that time to Milo's present-day perspective. After winning a scholarship, then a prestigious award, for his poetry, Milo has accepted a teaching job at the New School. Only he can't stand the work his privileged, selfie-generation students produce; none of his constant Google searches for Bridey turn up anything; and he's not totally sure what he's aiming to do by befriending a bright female student. In leaving apparent holes or unanswered questions in her layered story, Hoffman is fearless and trusting of her readers, and her precise prose captures the novel's many settings Greece, Washington State, New York City and her characters' feelings and actions, vividly.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
DEVILS BARGAIN: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, by Joshua Green. (Penguin, $17.) Green's deeply reported account explores Bannon's origin story and how he helped pull off a major political upset: the election of Donald J. Trump. Their partnership - and shared talents for whipping up spectacle and outrage - ushered in what Bannon saw as the culmination of a global populist uprising. RUNNING, by Cara Hoffman. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) It's 1988 in Athens, and a group of hustlers roam the city's underbelly. Bridley, who has left the United States behind, joins a British couple, Jasper and Milo, and is soon folded into their relationship. Our reviewer, Justin Torres, praised these "memorable antiheroes," calling them "tough and resourceful, scarred, feral and sexy." STALIN AND THE SCIENTISTS: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953, by Simon Ings. (Grove, $19.) For the founders of the Soviet Union, science was always a pillar of the state. But for scientists, the stakes were higher: If they published research the government did not endorse, they faced jail, exile or death. Ings offers a fascinating look at this establishment, which he calls "the glory and the laughingstock of the intellectual world." NEW BOY, by Tracy Chevalier. (Hogarth, $15.) In Chevalier's retelling of "Othello," part of Hogarth's series of novels revising Shakespeare plays, the events unfold over a single day on a Washington playground. When O, a sixth grader from Ghana, arrives at his new school in the 1970s, Dee, the most popular girl, is immediately drawn to him. As children and teachers alike weigh their unease with a black student in the school, a malicious classmate tries to torpedo the friendship - with a shocking conclusion. A HOUSE FULL OF FEMALES: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (Vintage, $18.) The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, draws on diaries, letters and even quilts to understand how women reacted to their church's controversial embrace of polygamy. But even as Mormon women strained under domestic responsibility, they were able to become political actors. 4 3 2 l, by Paul Auster. (Picador, $18.) After Archie Ferguson, the novel's central character, is born, Auster offers up four distinct versions of his life, with characters and themes that recur across his different lives. Our reviewer, Tom Perrotta, called the story "a work of outsize ambition and remarkable craft, a monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes."
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed journalist and novelist Hoffman (Be Safe I Love You; So Much Pretty) perfectly depicts two very different lives in her new novel. It simultaneously follows young Bridey Sullivan, who lives like a vagabond in 1980s Athens, Greece, and her friend Milo, a poet and New School professor in present-day Manhattan. Bridey met Milo and his boyfriend, former English prep school student Jasper, while looking for an easy way to make money in Athens. The three of them lived together on the top floor of a hotel, paid to scam tourists into staying there. The poetic way Hoffman describes their drunkenness and squalor and their complex relationship is one of the main draws of the novel. Then Milo tries to go straight, although he's unable to relate to his peers and is constantly seeking news of Bridey or trying to fill the hole she left in his life years earlier. VERDICT This -fascinating mix of youth, violence, and romantic and familial relations, loaded with socioeconomic issues, makes for a beautiful read. Recommended for readers of travel literature, coming-of-age fiction, and -LGBTQ stories. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]-Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Running Jasper died a week before I returned to Athens, so I never saw him again. They carried him out and down and he died in England, or maybe on the plane. There were witnesses in the lobby. There was a story in the newspaper. There was, the drunk boy said without raising his eyes to meet mine, proof. Out on the street, a hot breeze moved the suffocating air around and kicked up grit from the gutter. I stood for a time by the door of the bar waiting to feel something, then walked in the direction of Monastiraki. When I met Jasper in the spring of 1988, I still had fifty dollars, which was fifty dollars more than I had now. He wore a faded black T-shirt and dark pin-striped cutoffs that looked like they'd once been the trousers of a school uniform. His lank, oily blond hair was shaved in the back, hung in his face, and he was sweating. "I need to make some money right away," I told him. Jasper nodded, lit a cigarette. "There's quite a lot of ways to do that here," he said, his voice smooth and kind, his pale green eyes trained on my remaining possessions. We recognized one another. I wasn't a tourist. He'd get nothing for bringing me back to the hotel. We stood in the aisle, away from the seated passengers, with our arms hanging out the window, the bright hot sun burning down and a breeze born from the speed of the train blowing in upon our faces. Outside, terraced slopes of silver-leaved olive trees dotted the rocky yellow landscape, and piles of plastic bottles lay strewn by the edge of the track. He told me about a punk show he'd seen in London where a guy set his cock on fire using aerosol hairspray, and about a journal Alexander Pushkin kept that had been published after being banned for one hundred years. "I've been rewriting the want ads in dactylic hexameter," he said. "Why?" "Because it's funny. Because it makes them more beautiful," he said. "Obviously." Jasper described the city planning of Athens and the ruin that was London and the prospects of getting work in the olive groves of Artimeda. I wasn't used to people talking so much. "Where you from?" he asked. "The States," I said. "Originally," he said. "I mean where are you from originally?" "The United States." He shrugged as if I hadn't understood the question. "Athens is okay," Jasper said. "But you can't sleep out and you can't sleep in the underground. The idea is to get to the islands. You know, make enough money in the city or picking fruit somewhere. Or," he said, "by better, quicker means." His breath had the sweet medicinal bite of licorice and a cool flammable underlay. His eyes were a calm marbled green; skin so tender it looked like he might not yet shave; dimples beside a pair of fine, full lips. Jasper's was the kind of elegant placid face you saw in old portraits. His posture straight, his shoulders wide. It was only after half an hour of standing beside him that I noticed his left arm was in a cast. As we got closer to Athens, ragged, hungry-looking boys holding leaflets jostled onto the train, crowding the aisles, leaning on the arms of seats, talking to people about the islands or the Plaka or Mount Olympus. Saying they'd bring you to a nice place to stay; they'd take you to the ruins, to the port, to the bluest waters waiting just one more town away. "None of it," Jasper said, his eyes gone flat and dark as we approached the station, "is true." * * * Back then I also had a small bag. Carried my last pack of Camels and a lighter, my passport, newly exchanged blue drachma notes with statues of gods printed on them. I had a pair of cutoffs, a T-shirt, a pencil, some soap. I had a wool sweater, ammonium nitrate, electrical tape. I was flush with riches even after a year of sleeping out in train stations, church doorways, and parks. I had good boot laces. I had fire. Now I was sufficiently pared down to the essentials. The sweater was unnecessary; the extra T-shirt had become a towel. I'd come back to Athens after three months away picking olives, wandering the streets in Istanbul, and living in a border village that was a tight, rocky knot of land claimed alternately by Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. I'd come back against every rational instinct for self-preservation I'd ever known. We had lived together, Jasper and Milo, and me at a four-dollar-a-night hotel on Diligianni Street across from Larissis train station and a sick sliver of scrub grass littered with condoms and empty bottles that people called a park. Sometimes when Declan was between jobs he would stay there too. The city was like a beacon. And it drew us from wherever we'd been left. For me, the outskirts of a smoke jumpers' base in a cold mountain town, for Jasper and Milo the London suburbs and rain-soaked council housing of Manchester. We were looking for nothing and had found it in Athens: Demeter's lips white as stone, Apollo's yellow mantle sun washed, sanded, windblown to granite. The barren, blighted street outside our room in the low white ruin of the red-light district smelled like burning oil and a sooty haze hung in the middle distance. The hotel had no sign, but everyone called it Olympos. I first arrived in Greece by boat the year before, and didn't have money for meals. I had been hungry on that trip from Brindisi in a way I'd never experienced before. The heat, the vast, wind-filled open ocean, dark water shining like mercury beneath the sun; bright blue sky and wind, salt and sweat drying against your skin. I'd had a deck-class ticket and drifted along near the dining room's outdoor tables waiting for people to leave before they finished their meals. Then I'd slip in quickly for their leftovers. People think they need things. Money or respect or clean sheets. But they don't. You can wash your hair and brush your teeth with hand soap. You can sleep outside. You can eat whatever's there. Once you're in a warm place, you can live for years and years and years on one five-dollar bill to the next. Five dollars is a reasonable amount of money to come across in the course of a day. Jasper and Milo knew this before I did; good at surviving week to week, sipping sweetly from bottles of ouzo and Metaxa, reeling arm in arm before the Parthenon or the big television at Drinks Time. They were runners. We were all runners. I tried to imagine it now, to feel their presence again amid the concrete and noise, to hear Jasper's footsteps on the slick granite sidewalk. There was no money left to buy a train ticket or a deck-class. I'd been robbed in Tarlabasi and the last of the money we had made together was gone. I could stay or hitchhike but I was weighted down, tied, tired. The dementing arid heat of day was high and powerful and I could feel the sweat crawling across my scalp. Compact cars sped by on the dirty thoroughfare. I turned up Karolou Street and walked on the shadowed side along a block of empty buildings and shuttered cafés to get some reprieve from the sun's glare and the roar of the highway. I stopped at a kiosk to ask for a cup of water and when the man inside handed it to me his fingers grazed mine for a second and I had to look away. Excerpted from Running by Cara Hoffman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
