CANR
WORK TITLE: Running
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Hoffman, Cara Lynne
BIRTHDATE: 2/8/1969
WEBSITE: http://www.carahoffman.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 280
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal Feb. 1, 2017, Hoffman” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000205557&it=r&asid=932ad8dbfc2f8551268382ca0aa2c29c. Accessed 9 Mar. 2017. Gray, Kate. “Cara, “Hoffman, Cara. Running.”. p. 70+.
Publishers Weekly Dec. 19, 2016, , “Running.”. p. 91.
Kirkus Reviews Dec. 15, 2016, , “Hoffman, Cara: RUNNING.”.
Booklist Dec. 1, 2016, Bostrom, Annie. , “Running.”. p. 26.
ONLINE
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org (February 27, 2017), review of Running
Seattle Times, http://www.seattletimes.com (February 26, 2017), review of Running
HOFFMAN is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Running, So Much Pretty and Be Safe I Love You. She has written for the New York Times, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, Marie Claire, Salon, LitHub and National Public Radio, and is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including a Folio Prize nomination, and a Sundance Institute Global Filmmaking Award.
Originally from Northern Appalachia, Hoffman dropped out of high school and spent the next three years travelling and working in Europe and the Middle East. She did not go to college, became a newspaper reporter covering crime and environmental politics, and later attended graduate school at Goddard College, selling her first novel So Much Pretty, before receiving an MFA in 2009.
She has been a visiting writer at Columbia, St. John’s and University of Oxford. And currently teaches in the Stonecoast low residency MFA program at at the University of Southern Maine.
She lives in Manhattan with Marc Lepson.
A Conversation with Cara Hoffman about RUNNING
What is a runner?
I write in the novel that a runner is someone who lies about where he lives and then convinces you to come home with him. They work trains by selling unsuspecting tourists on low-end hotels, and in exchange they get a cut of the deal and a free place to sleep. RUNNING is inspired by my own experience working as a runner in the red light district of Athens when I was a teenager. Like the characters in the book, I walked the length of trains coming into Athens looking to hustle people who didn’t know their way around or hadn’t yet figured out where they’d be staying.
RUNNING is about three loners who band together to make their own family. What drew you to creating characters like Bridey, Jasper and Milo—all outsiders who left one world in search of another?
Bridey, Jasper and Milo are outsiders not only because they are the kind of people who are pushed away, but because they each left a world they believed was wrong. They recognize themselves in one another: bookish and quick and hungry for adventure and knowledge. People who would sleep on the street or in train stations for years if it meant they could go to the Acropolis, or Delphi, or keep travelling. And they love and respect each other in a world that’s unkind to people like them.
Bridey is a woman, Milo is black, Jasper is gay, two of them are poor, all of them are queer in one way or another; all of them are young. As part of an underclass, they reject a society that harms and denigrates others. As Milo says, “I don’t need a fascist to acknowledge my humanity.” But I didn’t write these characters simply to make a point, I wrote them this way because it’s an accurate reflection of the world I come from and the people I know. I think many people understand the idea of “chosen family.” To me, these are the deepest bonds because they’re based on intellect and affinity instead of blood.
Bridey, Jasper and Milo dropped out of school, but they continue to study, read voraciously and write with no one to guide them. Why was it important to you to highlight their intellect despite their lack of schooling?
Their lives on the street as runners and traffickers in no way diminish their lives as intellectuals. It’s common to think that people who are poor, or uneducated, or living outside the law are not intelligent, or that they don’t love and understand literature or art, or history or politics. It’s also common to think that intelligent people in situations like the ones in RUNNING are the exception. This, in my opinion, is always a mistake. There are plenty of brilliant people who never went to school, or made money, or became successful; the world is made of them, in fact.
In RUNNING, it was important to me to show characters who are thriving and wickedly intelligent, but who might be disregarded by general society all the same, because that has been my experience. Access to education does not equal intelligence. And, in my opinion, lack of life experience can hinder intellectual development and empathy.
The characters in RUNNING unintentionally become involved in an act of terrorism; making a decision that leads to the murder of several people and then letting someone else take the blame. As the story unfolds, we see that each character deals with the aftermath of their involvement differently. What are you hoping to convey by showing their different ways of coping and living with this brutal act?
This topic is something that I think is particularly important to talk about right now: How do people learn to live with the things they’ve done to others? Bridey, Jasper and Milo are teenagers when they play a key role in a violent event, and their immediate and long-term reactions vary drastically. When the novel opens, it is more than twenty years after the fact: Milo is now an adult and teaching at a prestigious university in Manhattan. He’s successful, respected, and accomplished, but his understanding of who he is and how the world works is entirely built around that that quick, callous, violent act and his part in it. Bridey knowingly involves herself in other acts of violence to rectify the first. I wrote her reaction as more active than intellectual. Taking responsibility for suffering; living with the complexity of that consciousness, not excusing it; rejecting the myth of natural outcomes, and of hierarchies, that’s Bridey’s journey in RUNNING.
RUNNING is set in 1989 Athens, the same time and place you were there. What attracted you to this time and place?
In the late 80s, Athens was one of the most permeable sites in Europe to enter with arms and drugs and was a popular destination for people trying to disappear for political or legal reasons. It had a large expatriate community of which I was a part. Athens is also a beautiful city and to me: it always felt familiar, even though I grew up in rural America and it was vastly different from anywhere I’d lived; bustling and dirty and whitewashed and sprawling. Winding and intimate, and surrounding an ancient ruin. I loved the music there and the dance and the smell of the place and the liquor and the underlying sense of desolation and survival. Athens was the city where I became myself. I had never felt so at home anywhere, or so powerfully alone.
In a starred review, Booklist says “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.” Your ability to so beautifully paint Athens and describe life as a runner stems from your time, over 25 years ago, living there and working as a runner yourself. How did you end up in Athens?
I had been travelling around Europe for about a year and was low on money. (I’d left the states with my savings from working in a restaurant and a bookstore, and I hadn’t been able to find under the table work in northern Europe.) I had been living in Venice, sleeping in the train station beside the Grand Canal and stowing on water taxis to get around and see the city. I met a trans-woman from Florida who told me she’d just come from travelling in the Greek islands. She said it was easy to find work there, and was a good place to go if you were sleeping outside and wanted to live cheaply. And I had met other people who told me Athens was a good place to find illegal work. So I took a train from Venice to Athens. I arrived with thirty dollars, one change of clothes, a notebook and a couple of paperbacks.
How did you become a runner?gb
On that train to Athens, just outside the city I got into a long conversation with an English boy who turned out to be a runner. He was looking for tourists to bring back to his hotel. He was also nineteen, like me, and had left home to live in the world. Before Athens, he’d been sleeping outside in a parking garage in Zagreb. I told him I was broke and looking for a job. He took me to the hotel he was working for, and the next day I started running trains.
How was it?
The hotel was dilapidated: the rooms were spare and people could pay a few drachmas to sleep on the roof. The top floor was condemned and crumbling—that’s where the runners lived. The buildings on either side of the hotel were brothels, the kind that actually had a single red bulb hanging in the entry way and a woman sitting beneath it in a folding metal chair.
Nearly every hotel in the red light district and the areas surrounding Omonia Square used runners. We came from many different countries. Most of us were young, many of us in our teens, but some were older people who had fallen on hard times or were trying not to be found.
We spent our time hustling tourists back to the hotel, reading and drinking, listening to Greek music and walking around ruins. I watched a lot of fights, worked and drank and spent time with people from radically different backgrounds. We were paid a commission for every tourist we brought back to the hotel. It was difficult to get people to stay in a place like that, so there was a lot of lying going on. The hotel printed a leaflet we were to pass out on trains that was full of pictures of some nice hotel that was absolutely not where we lived. There was no view of the Acropolis, no free continental breakfast; the place didn’t even have a sign outside.
Because of everything from cheap airfare to Airbnb to Facebook, the Athens you describe—a place where people can truly live off the grid—no longer exists. Are there still runners?
I am sure there are still outliers with wanderlust or intellectual pilgrims who do things like sleep in a church doorway so they can be near a Caravaggio painting they love. And I think there are still runners in remote places. The world never changes as fast for people with little money.
Before the Internet, it was common to make your travel arrangements based on word of mouth. And this was especially true among expats that had been travelling for multiple years and working under the table. Then, you knew someone who knew someone who knew about a job in village near Artemida or Delphi and you would just show up hoping to find that person at a bar they frequented. In retrospect, it seems surprising how often those connections worked out. But at the time it was common. I miss the power and the self-reliance of those times. I miss the solitude and quiet of it.
Have you been back to Athens since that time?
Three years ago, my partner had an artist’s residency in Florence, and from Italy we travelled to Greece. (That sentence alone tells you how much my life has changed since I lived in Athens in the 1980s.) When we arrived, I went back to the hotel and the neighborhood where I’d been a runner; this was after the financial crisis, and even so the neighborhood was better than it was when I’d lived there. The hotel was paintedand had a sign out front, and there were no broken windows, no garbage in the street, and it had an Internet café. The rate per night was seventy Euros; it was twenty-two hundred drachmas, or approximately seven dollars a night when I had lived there.
But it was still Athens. It was still sprawling and dirty and intimate and beautiful. I went up to my old room and stood outside the door and all I wanted to do was stay.
Cara Hoffman
Born: February 08, 1969 in New York, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2015. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Jan. 22, 2015
Table of Contents
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PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born February 8, 1969, in NY; children: one son. Education: Goddard College, M.F.A., 2009. Addresses: Home: Manhattan, NY.
CAREER:
Investigative reporter, writer, and educator. Lehman Alternative Community School, Ithaca, NY, English teacher; Tompkins Cortland Community College, Dryden, NY, English teacher; guest lecturer at Cornell University, Ithaca, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY; Lower Eastside Girls Club, New York, NY, writing tutor; Bronx Community College, New York, NY, instructor. Visiting writer at St. John's University, Columbia University, and Oxford University.
Also writer and reporter for various publications, including Fifth Estate.
AWARDS:
New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship, NY.
WORKS:
WRITINGS:
So Much Pretty (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2011.
Be Safe I Love You (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2014.
Also author of the blog Cara Hoffman. Essays have been featured on National Public Radio, Truthout, and Women's Media Center's Woman Under Siege.
Sidelights
Cara Hoffman is an American novelist who has also worked as an educator and an investigative reporter. In 2000 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship for her writing on the aesthetics of violence and its impact on children. Hoffman's debut novel, So Much Pretty, tells the story of three young women living in rural New York. Haeden, the town the novel is set in, is a small, tight-knit community occupied mainly by dairy farmers. At the onset of the novel, Wendy White, a sweet, mild-mannered girl who had just moved out on her own, vanishes without a trace. The case, for which there is no evidence, goes unsolved for several months until one day Wendy's body is found in a ditch. Stacy Flynn, a dairy industry reporter new to the area, is excited to cover the case. However, none of the locals she attempts to interview will discuss it with her. Many of them claim the killer must have been an outsider, not a resident of Haeden. Nevertheless, Stacy writes a detailed article about violence against women for the local paper. When Alice Piper, an exceedingly intelligent and strong-willed fifteen-year-old, reads the article, she is bothered by the fact that the case is unsolved and decides to become involved. Unfortunately for Alice, this yields some unintended consequences. In a letter addressed to readers of the book on the author's Web site, Hoffman stated: "I wrote So Much Pretty because I wanted to talk about family and community and the ways in which things that have become familiar to us are often not what they seem, are rife with meanings that elude our selective senses."
Reviewing the work on the S. Krishna's Books Web site, Swapna Krishna stated: "If you're a fan of beautifully written and disturbing, yet languorous literary fiction, then I definitely think you should pick this book up. ... So Much Pretty wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed it all the same." Of the book's structure, Heather Paulson wrote in Booklist that the "narrative oscillates between various characters, carefully building suspense, depth, and new insight with every chapter." A contributor to the Book Hooked Blog questioned the author's delving into multiple issues and using multiple narrators in the book when the main issue is sexual violence committed by people the victim knows. The contributor wrote: "So many pertinent issues are discussed that the book lost its focus. ... Between that and the constant changes in narrator, nothing felt fully fleshed out. It was like we only got brief glimpses of each part of the story." In her review on the Luxury Reading Web site, Melanie Kline said, "I was completely baffled throughout the entire book." She added: "Each chapter is about a different character in the novel intermingled with evidence files from completely random people," and Hoffman writes very little about the protagonist Wendy White. Reviewer Jack Cameron explained on his Web site that "So Much Pretty is told in fragments. It's as if you've been given a folder of relevant information that you have to put together in your head. This sort of narrative is difficult to pull off, but very rewarding when it works."
A Book Nook Club Web site reviewer remarked: "I will say that this book was one of the most surprising, thrilling, and unique that I've read in a really long time. ... It was one of the ugliest books I've ever read but incredible at the same time." Paul J. Comeau, a contributor to Verbicide, remarked: "Though it starts slow, the story gets intense quickly, building to a series of shocking plot twists that turn your expectations upside down, and make powerful statements about violence in America. Readers looking for a gritty crime thriller, or those looking for a literary novel of ideas, will find something to treasure in So Much Pretty." Maureen Linehan noted in the Manhattan Literature Examiner Web site that "So Much Pretty does an outstanding job of illustrating how a family of outsiders moved to a small quiet town, and left it in complete disarray. Hoffman does a great job of reeling you in, so you cannot stop reading until you know what Alice Piper did." An Elizabeth's Books contributor observed: "So Much Pretty is the book that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo wanted to be. It's a searing and sadly realistic examination of violence against women and a patriarchal society." A My Reading Room Web site contributor commented: "It's not a story that will leave you anytime soon. I am still thinking about the book and realizing new things."
Hipster Book Club Web site contributor Jessica Blanchard wrote: "Hoffman ... grounds her story in reality, drawing from her experience as a journalist and her research on violence and adolescents. Though fairly expected characters take the stage--idealists who shun conventionality, a weathered cop, a motivated reporter, the modest girl next door--their familiarity lends credence to the novel. These are people clinging to whatever life they can in a dying town. ... By using relatable and recognizable characters, Hoffman reinforces the disquieting realism at the core of the story." Rebecca Joines Schinsky stated in Book Lady's Blog: "This book is more than a pageturner. So Much Pretty is a haunting, thought-provoking Important Novel in disguise as a thriller. Hoffman presents violence against women and explores what happens when communities allow men to become perpetrators and to go unpunished." In a review for Curled Up with a Good Book, Luan Gaines summed up the book's style as having "a delicate juggling act, precise character development with the social context of an America found more in facade than reality," adding: "Hoffman takes all these things, adding moments of sweetness and affection and the inherent violence of wealth versus poverty in a provocative tale that is stunning, ambitious and unforgettable."
Mostly Fiction Book Reviews Web site contributor Betsey Van Horn observed: "This isn't a genre police procedural or conventional crime thriller. There's blood, but it's not gratuitous, and there's violence, but not in a vacuum. The everyday sexploitation in headlines and entertainment is exposed, like a raw nerve, and examined, with a naked eye, but not directly in the text in bankrupt slogans and empty bromides." A New Yorker reviewer remarked: "The book's eerie finale delivers the most potent message." Observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor: "The intersection of the lives of two smart young women with a shared consciousness turns what could have been a boring tale into something worth reading." Library Journal contributor Leslie Patterson concluded that the book "will engage individuals and book groups interested in debating" its issues. Said a Publishers Weekly contributor: "This searing novel will linger long in the reader's memory."
In 2014, Hoffman published her highly anticipated second novel, Be Safe I Love You. The novel tells the story of Lauren Clay, a female soldier who has unexpectedly returned home to rural New York after a tour in Iraq. It is evident right away that something is wrong, but her father wants to give her time and space to readjust to civilian life. Yet Lauren cannot bear it; she offers to take her beloved brother Danny to visit their mother but instead takes him into the icy woods of Canada to visit her new obsession, the Jeanne d'Arc basin--a snowy twin of the Iraqi oilfields. As the two embark on this dangerous journey, readers discover the disturbing nature of Lauren's tour of duty.
Reviewers lauded Be Safe I Love You. "The plight of the female soldier remains largely out of view--in print media, on television news, even in fiction and film," observed Lily Burana in a Washington Post review. "Through Lauren, Hoffman's thoroughly researched and carefully crafted heroine, Be Safe I Love You illuminates the distaff side of military service and the ways that life in uniform are at once different and, at times, uncannily similar for men and women." Boston Globe reviewer Karen Campbell likewise praised Hoffman's "searing portrait of PTSD" and "rare, illuminating glimpse into the distinctive experience and psyche of a female vet. Hoffman challenges us to imagine how extraordinarily difficult it must be to reconcile the innate protective instincts of the caregiver with a culture of violence and orders to kill. Yet she does that beautifully and poignantly, without destroying our hope for redemption and healing."
In a rare negative review, a Kirkus Reviews critic asserted that "Hoffman weaves an intricate plot, but a tendency to overwrite shadows her story, leaving the reader to make a complicated literary journey that, for some, may not be worth the effort." Noting that Hoffman "is much more intent on cutting through hype and hypocrisy than on turning out heroes," London Guardian critic Helen Benedict called Be Safe I Love You "exactly what a war novel should be: not a story about battles and guns and machismo, but a tale of refreshing honesty about the harm war does to us all, women, men and children alike, not only in battle, but at home." Alissa J. Rubin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, similarly characterized the novel as "a painful exploration of the devastation wrought by combat even when the person returns from war without a scratch. The story--written with such lucid detail it's hard to believe the main character is an invention--suggests the damage starts long before the soldier reports for duty. ... This book is a reminder that art and love are all that can keep us from despair."
FURTHER READINGS:
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2011, Heather Paulson, review of So Much Pretty, p. 56; February 1, 2014, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Be Safe I Love You, p. 19.
Bookseller, January 17, 2014, review of Be Safe I Love You, p. 31.
Boston Globe, May 1, 2014, Karen Campbell, review of Be Safe I Love You.
Guardian (London, England), May 14, 2014, Helen Benedict, review of Be Safe I Love You.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2010, review of So Much Pretty; February 15, 2014, review of Be Safe I Love You.
Library Journal, February 1, 2011, Leslie Patterson, review of So Much Pretty, p. 54; February 1, 2014, Lauren Gilbert, review of Be Safe I Love You, p. 65.
New Yorker, March 28, 2011, review of So Much Pretty, p. 107.
New York Times, May 23, 2014, Alissa J. Rubin, review of Be Safe I Love You.
Publishers Weekly, January 10, 2011, review of So Much Pretty, p. 30; January 13, 2014, review of Be Safe I Love You, p. 46.
Verbicide, March 30, 3011, Paul J. Comeau, review of So Much Pretty.
Washington Post Book World, April 24, 2014, Lily Burana, review of Be Safe I Love You.
ONLINE
Book Hooked Blog, http://www.bookhookedblog.com/ (March 22, 2011), review of So Much Pretty.
Book Lady's Blog, http://www.thebookladysblog.com/ (March 24, 2011), Rebecca Joines Schinsky, review of So Much Pretty.
Book Nook Club, http://booknookclub.blogspot.com/ (April 29, 2011), review of So Much Pretty.
Cara Hoffman Home Page, http://www.carahoffman.com (September 5, 2011).
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (March 1, 2011), Luan Gaines, review of So Much Pretty.
Elizabeth's Books, http://www.elizabethsbooks.com/ (April 5, 2011), review of So Much Pretty.
Head Butler, http://www.headbutler.com/ (March 9, 2011), Jesse Kornbluth, author interview.
Hipster Book Club, http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/ (April 1, 2011), Jessica Blanchard, review of So Much Pretty.
Jack Cameron.com, http://jackcameron.com/ (July 5, 2011), Jack Cameron, review of So Much Pretty.
Luxury Reading, http://luxuryreading.com/ (April 12, 2011), Melanie Kline, review of So Much Pretty.
Manhattan Literature Examiner http://www.examiner.com/ (March 14, 2011), Maureen Linehan, review of So Much Pretty.
Mostly Fiction Book Review, http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/ (April 11, 2011), Betsey Van Horn, review of So Much Pretty.
My Reading Room, http://myreadingroom-crystal.blogspot.com/ (March 17, 2011), review of So Much Pretty.
Our Stories, http://www.ourstories.us/ (April 18, 2012), Alexis E. Santí, author interview.
Sarah Cypher Web site, http://www.sarahcypher.com/ (April 9, 2011), author interview.
Simon & Schuster Web site, http://authors.simonandschuster.com/ (September 5, 2011), author interview.
S. Krishna's Books, http://www.skrishnasbooks.com/ (June 25, 2011), Swapna Krishna, review of So Much Pretty. *
Hoffman, Cara. Running
Kate Gray
Library Journal. 142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Hoffman, Cara. Running. S. & S. Feb. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9781476757575. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781476757599. F
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
Gray, Kate
Running
Publishers Weekly. 263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p91.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Running
Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4767-5757-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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.)
Hoffman, Cara: RUNNING
Kirkus Reviews. (Dec. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Hoffman, Cara RUNNING Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 21 ISBN: 978-1-4767-5757-5
Three scrappy outsiders--inextricably bonded less by circumstance than by love--struggle to survive in the sweat-drenched underbelly of Athens' red light district in the late 1980s. "We were looking for nothing and had found it in Athens," explains Bridey Sullivan in the opening pages of Hoffman's (Be Safe I Love You, 2014, etc.) third novel. She is 17, smart and wild and self-contained, feral, a survivor. She has come to Athens to escape the bizarre trauma of her childhood, raised by a kindly doomsday-planning uncle, a smoke jumper, in the far reaches of Washington state. When she meets Jasper, a British expat, an Eton dropout, on a train, she is immediately taken in by his beauty; his is "the kind of elegant placid face you saw in old portraits." Jasper's boyfriend is Milo, another Brit, a teenage boxer from Manchester. They scrape by as runners--hustlers who trawl trains for tourists to entice back to dumpy hotels in exchange for their own rooms and board; in love with each other, they form a kind of family, drunken and desperate but free, tied to nothing, loyal only to their own. But their grimy, sweaty sort of equilibrium cannot last, of course, and when one of their money-making schemes links them to a deadly act of terrorism, the trio is forced apart. The novel, sticky with the stultifying heat of Athens, oozes backward and forward in time and place: gritty 1980s Athens, Bridey's troubled childhood in Washington, and contemporary New York City, where Milo, now a successful poet, is in residence at the New School, drowning his sorrows in a never-ending stream of Four Loko. Crisp and immediate, the New York segments are a welcome contrast to the action in Greece, which is so beautiful and atmospheric that it sometimes feels as though it's happening behind a screen. A haunting novel, original and deeply sad.
Running
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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* Running.
By Cara Hoffman.
Feb. 2017. 288p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781476757575); e book, $13.99 (9781476757599).
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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.--Annie Bostrom
‘Running’ by Cara Hoffman
Review by Daphne Sidor
February 27, 2017
If you grow up blue-collar and book-worshiping, you spend your youth surprising people—either by what you’ve read or by where you come from, depending on what they see of you first, assuming they see you at all. You may get over it and return the condescending embrace of academia. Or you may turn against all forms of intellectual citizenship, allying yourself instead with the streets and their native autodidacts.
When we meet the two narrators of Cara Hoffman’s third novel, Running, they’ve taken the second path: straight into a demimonde of young, broke or born-poor expats circulating through the Mediterranean, where it’s warm enough to sleep outside. They’re runners, people employed to haunt train cars and draw gullible tourists back to the run-down Athens hotel they represent. (The milieu is so specific I wondered how an outsider might come into such intimate knowledge; it turns out Hoffman herself worked as a runner as a teenager.)
Bridey is a white American girl who finds the gig in the 1980s when she meets the beautiful, doomed Eton dropout Jasper. He invites her to share a room, an improbable book collection, and a bed with him and his lover Milo, a black boxer/poet from a council estate in Manchester who takes up the narrative later.
At first Bridey’s and Jasper’s meeting seems like the setup for a rather Jamesian tale: American innocence corrupted by aristocratic Old World decadence. Part of the genius of Running is that it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
We start to realize something’s off as Bridey recounts the violence of her days with unnerving flatness: during a brawl, for instance, she notes a kid “screaming in a way I hated, his eyes strained, like a frightened deer, bulging, whites showing, searching for a way out.”
Such weakness has been bred out of Bridey. In flashbacks we learn that she’s an orphan raised tough by her uncle, a loving nuclear-doomsday prepper who’s equal parts appalled and impressed when he discovers her facility with explosives. “She’d an air of resignation about her, like she was abiding the real world and might decide to get rid of it altogether,” thinks Milo.
There’s a certain suspense in wondering where Bridey’s moral compass points, and whether she has one at all. Like the gods whose ruined representations surround Athens, she’s capable of wrecking lives casually, with her head in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. In that, she’s well-matched with the increasingly drunken and desperate Jasper.
It’s Milo’s dubious fortune to survive them both. Hoffman juggles half a dozen time-frames throughout the book, one of which finds Milo 25 years later in New York. He’s acquired a Wikipedia entry and a poet-in-residence position at the New School, but he’s not exactly adjusting to the academic life. He still nurses resentment at “the bought-up world; the owned world” (as an epigraph from David Wojnarowicz has it) that once granted him and his teenage companions its leftovers ungrudgingly, as long as they didn’t ask for more.
Now, Milo guzzles Four Loko, has sex with homeless men, and compulsively searches the internet for traces of the disappeared Bridey. He lays the full weight of his emotional needs on his favorite student, a working-class Latina who’ll take Milo as a weepy pal, but would prefer he step up as mentor. She wants to go to Brown.
Thinking back to his college days after a richer education on the Athens streets, Milo isn’t sure he can recommend the classic collegiate experience:
His friends, his professors, thought Milo was an exception, not evidence that a broader, wilder intellectual world existed, and he loved them still, loved drunken nights dancing, loved praise in the classroom; whole rooms full of serious queers talking about death and rights. But he knew none of it was the kind of freedom he’d had with Jasper and Bridey, who never once called themselves a name or believed the things they did with their bodies could mean anything to anyone but them.
Undoubtedly there’s romance in Milo’s (and Hoffman’s) view of life on the street. There’s also immense sadness. Running has plenty of dazzle; it races atop remarkable sentences. But at its core are two people who, accustomed to getting by on nothing, have no idea what to do with the bounties that befall them: success, family, love.
Milo sits with his confusion. Bridey can only run. At one point, she recalls the moment she told her uncle she was leaving home: “I sat next to him and knew that if he was like me, he was starting to feel relieved, happy that he could get back to being alone.” Whether she’s right or wrong, what’s left is heartbreak.
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In ‘Running,’ a makeshift family confronts the past
Originally published February 26, 2017 at 7:00 am
Cara Hoffman’s haunting, wistful third novel visits a group of friends in the past and present, as they face the consequences of a lost time.
Claudia RoweBy Claudia Rowe
Special to The Seattle Times
“Running”
by Cara Hoffman
Simon & Schuster, 271 pp., $26
In our hyper-connected and gadget-bound age, the idea of living happily without possessions or email is almost subversive. And beneath the deceptive lyricism of her prose, Cara Hoffman has long shown a healthy fascination with upending the social order.
“People think they need things. Money or respect or clean sheets. But they don’t,” Hoffman writes in “Running,” her haunting and wistful third novel. “You can wash your hair and brush your teeth with hand soap. You can sleep outside. You can eat whatever’s there.”
The speaker of these words is Bridey, a parentless teenager from Washington state, surviving by guile and wit in late-1980s Athens with little to her name but the matches, lighter fluid and electrical tape she stores in her backpack. Bridey lives with two British expats: Jasper, a disaffected Eton dropout, and his lover, Milo, a poet from the projects. They occupy the top floor of a shady motel where, in return for free accommodations, they work as runners, beckoning weary tourists to book one of the grimy rooms below.
According to press materials, Hoffman herself lived similarly in younger years, getting by as a runner and taking notes for what would become this novel. No surprise. Her observations have the keen immediacy of lived scenes, similar to drawings sketched from life.
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But her story, which proceeds along two tracks — one past, one present — is somewhat more fantastic. Mostly it concerns a moneymaking scheme that inadvertently links Bridey, Jasper and Milo to a terrorist plot in which several innocents are murdered. Those memories echo still in the mind of Milo who, 25 years later, has become a famous poet and teacher in New York City but cannot shake those days. Constantly, compulsively, he searches the streets and the internet for Bridey, lost to the fog of a disappeared time.
As the plot intercuts between Milo’s present-day and Bridey’s pre-internet 1980s, Hoffman’s portraits show just how revolutionary it nowadays is to live outside the norms of commerce. Milo’s students write poems about text messaging. But their lonely professor can’t keep himself from sleeping with young drifters in the park, on the sidewalk — as if trying to find his way back to a more romantic, less encumbered time.
After her well-received first novel, “So Much Pretty,” came out in 2011, Hoffman was once or twice chided for verging into screed — particularly about misogyny. She is no less fierce today but has become subtler in her statement-making, if sometimes guilty of presenting secondary characters as sketches, like Navas, a favorite student of Milo’s who is black, brilliant and, of course, different from the others; and Declan, a tattooed IRA mercenary fond of head-butting those who irritate him.
An interest in violence — particularly the political and institutional variety — echoes through much of Hoffman’s work. But here, the main actors are street kids, and Hoffman writes about their makeshift family with deep affection for the outsider.
“It’s the damage they love, really,” observes Jasper of the tourists flooding off the Athens trains to gawk at the crumbling evidence of a lost world. “They say it’s the history, but it’s the damage. No one would care in the least if these things were new — covered with gaudy, bright primary colors like it was back then. They love the ruin.”
The same could be said of Hoffman.
Claudia Rowe is a staff reporter at The Seattle Times.