After ALA Midwinter was over, I went up to Vail for a few days to snowshoe, cross-country ski, and catch up on some reading. Despite the gorgeous view outside, I was glued to Chandler Burr’s debut You or Someone Like You. The novel follows Anne Rosenbaum and her husband Howard, from the days they met as PhD students at Columbia to their move from New York to Los Angeles. Howard is offered a job as a liaison between a studio and a publisher, which quickly morphs him into a Hollywood institution—a mover and shaker. Anne never effectively has a career of her own, which catalyzes her desire to start a book club.
Unexpectedly, Anne finds herself leading a high-level literary salon for Hollywood A-listers. Swept up in an improbable moment of intellectual celebrity, she fails to notice troubling changes in her thirty-year marriage to Howard, as well as significant signals from her teenaged son Sam. While Sam’s investigation into questions of identity rock Howard and Anne to their cores, Howard is leveled by a crisis of conscience that forces him to leave behind his wife, his son, and everything he loves. In a desperate attempt to communicate with a husband who has shut her out completely, Anne resorts to the book clubs, turning the gossipy channels of the Hollywood elite into a means to reach out to her husband, and speak to him through literature.
For anyone who loves the classics as much as I do, the writing is truly a treat. Burr references everything from Shakespeare and Shelley to Joyce and Wharton—it’s an English major’s dream. You or Someone Like You also deals with some weighty issues—religion being one of them. I have no doubt that this book will be controversial, especially in real-life book clubs.
You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr
On Sale: 6/9/2009
Ecco, $25.99
In 1949, in Kobe, Japan, Onitsuka Kihachiro (KIHACHIRO ONITSUKA) founded the ASICS predecessor.
Posted by: Onitsuka Tiger Mexico Mid | September 11, 2012 at 09:18 PM