Star-Crossed Suburbia

By Paul Gray

Author Frederick Reiken has shown a knack for teasingly offbeat titles. He called his first novel The Odd Sea (1998), itself a rather odd construction that turns out to represent what a child in the book hears when a grownup mentions The Odyssey. This accidental pun turns out to be entirely appropriate to a story of strange, present-day wanderings. Now comes The Lost Legends of New Jersey (Harcourt; 312 pages; $24), which sounds like a nightclub joke, given the Garden State's unfortunate reputation as a wasteland that keeps New York City from bumping into Philadelphia.

But Anthony Rubin, the novel's teenage protagonist, isn't laughing. He needs to make some sense of his life, particularly of the mother who has recently abandoned him, his elder sister and his father to live by herself in Florida: "He tried to think of her the way he thought of characters in legends. But he was always doing that, making things up, trying to see how it all might fit into a legend. He didn't understand why he did this, because New Jersey was not legend. It was the armpit of America, according to most people. Still he saw everything around him as a legend."

Anthony's yearning romanticism seems to be enthusiastically shared by his creator. As Reiken's story unfolds, covering roughly four years (1979-83) and dipping into the thoughts of a number of characters, an aura of wonder begins to hover over the suburban landscapes and lives. Before the breakup, Anthony and his sister know that their physician-father is cheating on their mother; one evening, at a diner, she tells the two of them that she also knows about the infidelities. The children can't understand the behavior of either parent, but neither, as the novel reveals, can the parents. They both feel driven, scripted into acts they would never have chosen if they'd truly had a choice.

This household drama of love gone wrong confronts Anthony just as he is beginning to get interested in girls, particularly in Juliette Dimiglio, who lives next door. This relationship seems star-crossed at the start. He is well behaved and Jewish; she is the tough-talking daughter of a reputed, although incorrectly, Italian mobster. They have nothing in common, which makes the bond that develops between them all the more magical and miraculous. Anthony knows he will lose Juliette eventually; she keeps telling him so, and one snowy morning she tells him the news that she is moving away: "Then she stepped close enough that together they breathed a cloud that they could stand within, concealed, as the snow fell dustlike over Cherry Hill Road, over Livingston and all of the northern suburbs of New Jersey."

This direct echo of the most famous passage in James Joyce's The Dead is an isolated instance of Reiken taking his romanticism too far and over the top. For the most part, he strikes a restrained balance between mysteries and matters of fact. By the conclusion of this complex, engrossing novel, the title no longer seems the least bit funny.

--By Paul Gray