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Summary
Summary
This funny, exuberant novel captures the reader with the grand sweep of seven-foot-tall David "Lizard" Hochmeyer's larger-than-life quest to unravel the mystery surrounding his parents' deaths. It's a journey laden with pro football stars, a master chef and his beautiful transvestite lover, a world-famous ballerina and her English rocker husband, and a sister who's as brilliant as she is unstable. A wildly entertaining, plot-twisting novel of murder, seduction, and revenge--rich in incident, expansive in character, and lavish in setting --Life Among Giants is an exhilarating adventure.
Editors' pick for Amazon's Best of 2012
Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012
Columbus Dispatch 's Top Books of 2012
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An exploration of lives touched by greatness and tragedy in equal measure, Roorbach's latest novel traces towering Princeton graduate and NFL player-cum- restaurateur David "Lizard" Hochmeyer in his attempt to unravel the tangled conspiracy behind his parents' murder in 1970. When his parents are killed in front of him at a restaurant, David believes the culprits are connected to his neighbor, the elegant ballerina Sylphide, whose rock star husband also died under mysterious circumstances, and with whom David has fallen heedlessly in love. As David trades a career in football for one in food, his sister, Kate, a tennis star with "tough girl" endorsements, slides into paranoia over their parents' deaths. It is a soapy and thrilling indulgence, a tale of opulence, love triangles, and madness, set against a sumptuous landscape of lust and feasts, a sensory abundance that fails to mitigate the sorrows of David's youth. This is a purely Gatsbyesque portrayal of celebrity; David and Sylphide inhabit a galaxy of stars, each more blinding and destructive than the next, drawing intrigue and violence into their orbits. Roorbach (Big Bend) has written a mystery free of contemporary cynicism and recalling the glitter and allure of a kind of stardom that has also, in its way, been collateral damage to a greedy financial machine. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
With memories of people tangled "in a hopeless knot," David "Lizard" Hochmeyer attempts to unravel the Gordian in Roorbach's (Temple Stream, 2005, etc.) latest novel. The people include his assassinated parents; Emily, his African-American-Korean first love; and Sylphide, prima ballerina and widow. Sylphide's husband was Dabney Stryker-Stewart, an internationally famous rock star knighted for his work with children trapped in war. Add Kate, Lizard's talented tennis-playing sister; her lover and professor, Jack Cross, a famed pop-psychologist teaching at Yale; and Don Shula, legendary Miami Dolphins coach. Next come Etienne, chef extraordinaire, tattooed head to toe, and RuAngela, Etienne's five o'clock--shadowed transvestite lover. That's a mere sampling of the exotic, eye-catching cast, the best thing about this book. Lizard's father, always skating the edge of respectability and propriety, is a foot soldier in a Wall Street Gecko-type financial shell game. Lizard's mother, married beneath her station, drinks martinis and plays country-club tennis, her talent as a tournament ringer for the moneyed set assuring the family access to the right circles. The family resides next door to High Side, palatial home of Sylphide and Dabney, where teenage Kate was caretaker for Dabney's son and became Dabney's lover. Then Nick, Lizard's father, turned state's evidence and was shot dead, along with his wife, for his trouble. Great setup, sparkling characters, but one-third into the book readers will hunger for less setup and characterization and want the story to get moving. It does, in complex fashion. Kate goes bonkers after her parents' murders. Emily and Sylphide jump in and out of Lizard's bed and his charmed life--he's a backup quarterback for the Dolphins, owner of two successful, trendy restaurants--before things take a turn. Roorbach knows food; readers will want recipes of the fare he describes. The rich-and-famous lifestyle is nicely rendered, too. A narrative threaded through with corruption and an appreciable number of love stories.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
David Lizard Hochmeyer is enormous, nearly seven feet tall, and so is the labyrinth of tragedy and revenge he navigates in Roorbach's novel. The high-school football star is headed to Princeton and then an NFL career when his parents are murdered. Both his and his sister's lives are irreparably shaken and become significantly intertwined with the world-famous ballerina who lives nearby. Roorbach has created a memorable narrator who possesses the disarming frankness of Holden Caulfield and whose rapid-fire delivery and cutting characterizations expertly shift between memories and the present moment. Lizard keeps this part-mystery, part-coming-of-age-tale humming, as the cavalcade of revelations rolls by, prompting the reader to echo Lizard's signature, Whoa! This is one of those novels you read because you care about what happens to the people and the connections between them as those connections grow, fray, and snap. By turns surreal and gritty, the book is written with the same muscular grace possessed by the dancers and athletes who are its main charaters.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AN enchanting, darkly mysterious ballerina. A dead rock star. An unsolved double homicide, decades old. A father felled by a shadowy past. An older sister as beautiful as she is mad. A gay vegetarian chef covered in tattoos. His transvestite lover. Secret passage-ways, nighttime trysts, affairs, embezzling, illicit recordings - all of it revolving around one 6-foot-8, humble, sincere, Ivy League-educated orphaned professional football player. Really, what more could you want? As you might guess from its title if not from the list above, Bill Roorbach's second novel, "Life Among Giants," is a larger-than-life production. Yet all of its wild characters feel genuine, their aches and flaws and desires wholly organic; and the plot they're tangled in moves forward at a breakneck pace. It's a dizzy romp. There's murder and intrigue and sex and terror, and Roorbach is generous with it all. The plot swirls around that mysterious double murder. As a high school student, David Hochmeyer - known as Lizard - witnesses the shooting of his parents. Until then his life has seemed normal, if blessed (Lizard is a star football player, recruited by Princeton), but of course things are not as they seem. Lizard's older sister, Kate, already at Yale and shacked up with a handsome professor, is traumatized by the murder, and descends into mania and madness. Across the street from the Hochmeyers' modest home is the "High Side," a palatial estate where the great ballerina Sylphide lived with her rock star husband, Dabney Stryker-Stewart, until his death. Nothing is unraveled without revealing another jumbled mystery, and Lizard discovers that the two households are more entwined than expected - and that their entanglement is both sexy and deadly. As I said, this is a romp. Which isn't to say there isn't real meat here. Roorbach doesn't let the novel's rich entertainment stand in the way of emotional subtlety or homey, down-to-earth prose: "The dancer rose like heat from her chair, glided to me, extended long hands." The teenage Lizard is a real boy, struggling with how to grow up amid great loss. He is, at times, a bit of a marionette - the women in the book hold the strings - but he's no sap. He has integrity, but he's also a lonesome young man looking for love and companionship, and we're on his side throughout. His sister's madness, meanwhile, isn't played for cheap drama or laughs. The entire novel seems to mourn the brilliant girl she could have been if she weren't so (understandably) obsessed with her parents' murder. That mystery remains unsolved for decades, and as we follow Lizard and Kate into adulthood, the old wiring of the trauma feels alive, electric and surprisingly dangerous. Roorbach seems to relish creating lushly bold biographies for his characters, then getting the shading right - carefully applying depth and warmth and pathos and strange tenderness. These characters are not regular people, but they never feel like caricatures. Perhaps because the pages turn themselves so quickly, perhaps because the settings are so delicious (the dead rock star's mansion is a palace of fantasy sex, a dream world of secret passages, false bottoms and hidden keys), perhaps because the emotional mystery of these characters' minds begins to take precedence over the actual cold-case-file mystery, when the truth is revealed, it feels a bit irrelevant and forced. But maybe that's for the best. The fun is in the mystery, not in the resolution - and luckily, here, the characters' search for love and truth remains achingly unresolved. Haley Tanner is the author of the novel "Vaclav & Lena."
Library Journal Review
This ambitious, energetic novel from Roorbach (Big Bend) has something for everyone-steamy sex, rock stars, ballet stars, professional football, a dysfunctional family, an unsolved murder, and a complicated revenge plot. The narrator, David (Lizard) Hockmeyer, is a giant himself, a former high school football player who's almost seven feet tall. His parents were shot in front of him when he was a teen, and he and his troubled, bipolar sister Kate have been obsessed for decades with finding the killers. Lizard and Kate live in Connecticut near a celebrated Swedish ballerina who calls herself Sylphide after the classic ballet and is the widow of Dabney, a flamboyant British rocker who died in a car crash. (Improbably, Dabney is already a big star in America in the early 1960s, before the Beatles and the British invasion.) In the end, Lizard and Sylphide's lives intersect in more ways than either of them could have imagined. V-ERDICT This big, sprawling novel has so much going on that it's easy to lose track of the murder mystery at its heart. It would pack more of a punch if it had a sharper focus.-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
