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WORK TITLE: Little Disasters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE: https://www.randallkleinbooks.com/
CITY: Charlottesville
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and book editor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1980, Randall Klein is a writer and book editor based in Charlottesville, Virginia. His debut novel is the 2018 Little Disasters, about two young married couples each expecting their first child and the subsequent year of drastic changes to their lives. The story starts in 2010 Manhattan with the mysterious breakdown of the subway. The train that paralegal Paul is riding tells all passengers to disembark. He tries to make his way to Brooklyn to meet up with his wife, freelance writer Jenny. Meanwhile, Jenny texts carpenter Michael, with whom she’s having an affair, that with the trains stopped, she can’t meet him, so he heads back to Brooklyn. As both men make their Odysseys through the paralyzed city, they recall events that happened just one year ago. Michael and wife Rebecca delivered a son, however Paul and Jenny’s baby died at birth. The trouble starts when Paul asks Michael to convert his unused nursery into an office for Jenny. Michael falls for the dark yet smart Jenny.
Through alternating voices of the male characters, Klein reveals the affairs, indiscretions, and deceit. “This very well-groomed, domestic drama, with strongly developed and realistically voiced male characters, marks an auspicious debut,” according to Annie Bostrom in Booklist. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted that Klein loses his way when he presents high drama and trauma with the baby’s death and Paul’s journey through the subway tunnel. Nevertheless, according to the reviewer, “Klein is at his best making notes on the nuances of behavior in this particular tribe of Brooklynites advancing warily into maturity,” and Klein creates a well-composed work in which all four major characters are treated with respect.
“With a palpable feel for the city and its young strivers, Little Disasters is a poignant debut driven as much by resolving the uncertain future of these once content couples as by revealing just what caused the Midtown meltdown,” declared Bruce Jacobs online at Shelf Awareness. With unusual coincidences and limited characterizations, such as Rebecca being so motherly she bakes cookies for a living, this complex novel “is a bit tone-deaf on parenting and loss. A twisted love letter to New York City,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Nevertheless, Chicago Review of Books writer Ian Macallen said: “Klein has deftly crafted a domestic drama twisted around an intriguing mystery and the resulting novel is fun to read while emotionally impactful. Little Disasters delivers a highly readable literary novel that confronts infidelity, the loss of a child, and the risk of bad decisions.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of Little Disasters, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Little Disasters.
Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2018, review of Little Disasters, p. 46.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (June 20, 2018), Ian Macallen, review of Little Disasters.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (May 1, 2018), Bruce Jacobs, review of Little Disasters.
Randall Klein is a writer and book editor living in Charlottesville, VA. Little Disasters is his first novel.
Little Disasters
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Little Disasters.
By Randall Klein.
May 2018. 352p. Viking, $27 (9780735221680).
In 2010, the present of book editor Klein's New York-set first novel, a disaster has just happened somewhere around Midtown. Michael, married to Becky, is waiting at the Cloisters for Jenny, with whom he's having an affair, when she texts to say she can't make it. He heads back to Brooklyn from Manhattan's northernmost tip to rectify the situation when he learns that trains and traffic are stopped, and he won't be getting anywhere unless it's on foot. Meanwhile, Jenny's husband Paul's train stops below the East River and all passengers must evacuate. Alternating between Michael and Paul's perspectives and journeys toward Brooklyn (with Michael voicing the lion's share of the novel), the story jumps back to a year prior, when the two couples fatefully met. Constant movement between time-stamped sections and Michael and Jenny's affair, exciting and somehow uncomplicated, propels readers through the upsets, in and outside of these relationships, of the past year. This very well-groomed, domestic drama, with strongly developed and realistically voiced male characters, marks an auspicious debut.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Little Disasters." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268047/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c6dfa3f1. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268047
Klein, Randall: LITTLE DISASTERS
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Klein, Randall LITTLE DISASTERS Viking (Adult Fiction) $27.00 5, 22 ISBN: 978-0-7352-2168-0
An extramarital affair in Brooklyn culminates on the day of an ominous subway shutdown in this debut novel.
A year ago, Paul and Jenny and Michael and Rebecca--couples as-yet-unconnected--go to the same hospital in Brooklyn for scheduled pregnancy inductions. Though it's 2009, both women insist on laboring alone, leaving both men in the waiting room to stew. This is the first bit of uncanny coincidence and the setting of the first not-so-little disaster: Paul and Jenny's son dies shortly after his birth. A month later, Paul bizarrely decides to contract Michael, a carpenter, to turn their nursery into an office for Jenny. He also invites Michael and Rebecca to dinner, which, unsurprisingly, is a disaster. Maybe a little one, but it lays the groundwork for a grim affair. Michael, a cynical native New Yorker, witty and brimming with self-satisfaction, is drawn to the dark and clever Jenny. While he claims over and over to love his wife and new son (both ciphers, the wife so perfectly good that she bakes cookies for a living), he dives into the affair relentlessly. A year later, when the book begins, Michael is in the northernmost tip of Manhattan, waiting to start a new life with Jenny, who stands him up. Paul is on the subway under the river, hopeful that Jenny will keep her promise to stay with him, when the trains stop running. The complex novel tracks both of the men's arduous journeys back to Jenny with gritty, sweaty specificity while they wonder what kind of giant disaster stranded them. Interposed are chapters from each of their viewpoints leading up to the present. Paul, a seeming milquetoast, hides some interesting, small perversions. Perhaps this explains his desire to be friends with strangers who have what he tragically does not, but the book is a bit tone-deaf on parenting and loss.
A twisted love letter to New York City.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Klein, Randall: LITTLE DISASTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650858/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=286e4a52. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650858
Little Disasters
Publishers Weekly. 265.10 (Mar. 5, 2018): p46+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Little Disasters
Randall Klein. Viking, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2168-0
Klein's sharply observant debut follows two young couples in hipster Brooklyn through a year of changes. Part of the novel takes place on a steamy summer day in 2010, the rest of it in the year leading up to that day. On July 19, a mysterious accident has shut down the subway system and closed off much of midtown Manhattan. Michael, an artist and furniture maker and Paul, an actor and paralegal, attempt to get back to Brooklyn to meet the woman they both love, Jenny, an aspiring novelist and Paul's wife. Michael's wife, Rebecca, a cookie entrepreneur, waits at home with their one-year-old son. The novel, told from the alternating points of view of Michael and Paul, plays the evolution of the affair between Michael and Jenny against the physical challenges the men face on their Odysseys home. Klein is at his best making notes on the nuances of behavior in this particular tribe of Brooklynites advancing warily into maturity, and in tracking unsentimentally the progress of an affair. He loses his way when he ventures into high drama, as when he gives Jenny and Paul a baby who dies immediately after being born, or thrusts Paul into hero mode in a journey through a subway tunnel. These unfortunate operatic moments aside, Klein pulls off a well-composed chamber piece in which all four principal characters are treated with respect. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Little Disasters." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 46+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530430251/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=98396736. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530430251
Little Disasters by Randall Klein, review by Bruce Jacobs
Two babies are born the same July day in 2009 at Park Slope's New York Methodist Hospital. One arrives healthy with all flags flying on his Apgar; the other dies almost immediately of a congenital heart defect. Their fathers meet first in the waiting room and escape outside to share cigarettes and bourbon in a flask. From this chance encounter, Randall Klein's first novel, Little Disasters, spins a story of fraying relationships and stretched love. The dramas play out in a city brought to its knees by a heat wave, rolling brownouts and a mysterious catastrophe in Midtown that causes stalled subways, gridlocked streets and panicked New Yorkers, still reeling from 9/11.
Living in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, Paul and Jenny have already prepped a room in their small apartment for their deceased baby. Paul is a chisel-faced actor chasing auditions and working as a paralegal in Manhattan. Unpublished novelist Jenny does freelance editing to help pay the bills. Somewhat timid pioneers in Red Hook, Michael and Rebecca manage to cover the rent with help from his parents. An occasional artist, Michael crafts furniture for Brooklyn gentrifiers, and Rebecca builds her Becky's Bites artisanal cookie business out of their small apartment kitchen. They are typical 21st-century New York couples straddling age 30 full of ambition and optimism--until they aren't.
After a decade editing books, Klein has honed his writing chops. His chapters are alternately narrated by Michael and Paul, and effortlessly shift in time between that birth year when everything changed in their lives and the present, when they are stranded in Manhattan by the unknown disaster. Bound by their day in the hospital waiting room but separated by the radically divergent fates of their babies, the couples begin to socialize. Michael and Rebecca reach out in solace--or more likely, in guilt because their son is such a happy part of their lives. Paul and Jenny's loss and symbolic empty nursery have shredded their relationship.
Michael offers to turn the baby room into a custom-built office for Jenny. Rebecca hosts dinner get-togethers and sends them fresh cookies. Emotions run high. Thrown together during the nursery remodel while their spouses work, Michael and Jenny begin an intense affair. They traverse the city as an amorous couple between bouts of clandestine sex. Euphoria rules. As Michael reflects, "I want the mountains of a relationship; I'm too young to move to the plains."
Paul and Michael not only share their perspectives on the year that followed their chance hospital meeting, but also describe the fear and confusion of millions caught in the tunnels beneath Manhattan while their city may be crumbling above them. With a palpable feel for the city and its young strivers, Little Disasters is a poignant debut driven as much by resolving the uncertain future of these once content couples as by revealing just what caused the Midtown meltdown. Like Paul and Michael, we might have to go outside for a break now and then while awaiting resolution.
Bruce Jacobs's review first appeared in Shelf Awareness.
BY IAN MACALLEN
JUNE 20, 2018
COMMENTS 0
The birth of a first child is a seminal moment. Parents prepare as best they can, but the challenges of newborn can destabilize even the most committed partners. Even in the best conditions, maintaining a relationship doesn’t always work, and nothing will prepare a new parent for the death of their infant.
In calamity, people seek solace in identifying some tiny error they’ve made as though by acknowledging it, they can correct the damage wrought. Correcting the mistake doesn’t always work, but small decisions can have a huge impact on outcomes. Such is the case in Randall Klein’s novel Little Disasters. Two couples, Michael and Rebecca and Paul and Jenny, find their lives intertwined and then disrupted by the seemingly minor choices they make following the birth of their children.
Michael, a furniture maker, meets Paul, an actor, in the hospital waiting room. Their lives might never have crossed again except for the death of Paul and Jenny’s baby. Paul hopes to help Jenny grieve by converting their nursery back into a home office and asks Michael to take on the project of building her a set of bookcases. Over the course of his time working on the home office, Michael finds himself enchanted by Jenny who ameliorates the loss of her child by seducing him. Michael is selfish enough to believe he can love both Rebecca, the mother of his child, and Jenny simultaneously. And then he has to choose between them.
The novel unfolds across two times—a present, set in 2010, and a past, beginning one year prior. During the course of the novel, the 2010 timeline occurs in a single summer day when New York City is brought to a standstill—brownouts, suspended subway service, and a mysterious smoke plume rising over midtown. The timeline set a year earlier begins with the birth of the couples’ children, and the affair between Michael and Jenny unfolds over the course of the year as the narrative races towards that summer day in 2010.
The narrative set in 2010 adds momentum to the text. Interspersed between segments of the 2009 timeline, the present day story arc helps infuse energy into the story. Neither Paul nor Michael know what has brought New York City to a halt. This mystery component in the 2010 sections creates a desire to keep reading. Michael considers the possibility of a terror attack or a subway accident. His day grows more strange as the narrative progresses—cabs refusing a fare, ATMs refusing to operate. Paul is equally in the dark, quite literally. He is forced to evacuate a subway car through the underground tunnels. Klein teases the reader with bits of information in the present and then returns to the 2009 timeline. The effect increases the reader’s interest in both times by offering crumbs of information. The reader knows Jenny and Michael end up in a relationship outside their marriages. The tension of whether they will or won’t is diffused, but that allows for the pleasure from watching the train wreck transpire. At each step in the process they make a small choices that ultimately will derail their lives.
The narrative point of view switches back and forth between Michael and Paul. The technique allows the reader to see the interiority of both men, however Michael comes to dominate the reader’s sympathies. In some instances, Michael’s point of view dissolves the fourth wall with asides meant for the reader. The result undermines Paul as a protagonist. For instance, when Paul confesses to Michael he feels some anxiety that his acting job requires him to kiss another woman, Michael rolls his eyes suggesting Paul is overreacting, and then later says only to the reader: “I wave his nonsense off. Shut up, Paul” (178). The aside subverts empathy for Paul who is more often spoken of by Michael in a diminishing way.
The narrative is built on layers of many smaller choices leading to the climax rather than a singular, all important decision, and Klein relies on these relatively minor moments to infuse energy into the narrative. The whole novel is set into motion by Paul’s decision to ask Michael to construct the shelving, but from there the characters’ opportunities to derail or right themselves come rapidly: Jenny leaves the door open so Michael can watch her shower; Michael chooses to cheat on his wife; Michael chooses to leave Rebecca. This theme is mirrored too in Jenny’s anxiety about her dead child. The child died of a heart condition, but that doesn’t prevent Jenny from worrying choices she made while pregnant or even before she had a child lead to the condition. These characters seem to be confronting the problem of fate versus free will, and Klein is clearly on the side of free will.
The women in the novel are not treated well and remain secondary characters to the emotional struggles of Paul and Michael. The reader is never privy to Jenny’s interiority so the only way to judge her actions are through the perspectives of the two men she is sleeping with. Whether she truly loves Michael or simply saw him as a convenient way to grieve remains ambiguous. Rebecca’s position in the novel is reduced even further. While she does eventually force Michael to choose between herself and Jenny, she isn’t particularly present and serves more as an obstacle.
Also resulting from the male characters’ point of view, as the affair progresses, Jenny is slut-shamed. She reveals to Michael that she has previously cheated on Paul with several men. These men she has left on a whim because she didn’t love them, a difference with the way she feels about Michael, she assures him. However, and perhaps this is simply because we learn of this through Michael’s point of view, her other extramarital relationships feel like they are diminishing Jenny. Michael doesn’t help this by acting as though Jenny is unjustifiably imposing on his time. She texts him while Michael is grocery shopping with Rebecca, and Michael blows her off. She responds with a curt “It’s not anybody’s fault. Bye,” in a way that opens her up to Michael’s internalized criticism: “And this bye, like a high school poet’s suicide threat, the sign-off of jaded youth.” Michael trivializes her and her emotional needs. When Jenny wants him, according to Michael, she’s acting childishly and immature.
The novel tries very hard to be a “New York Novel,” although not in the way Bright Lights, Big City strives for, but more like Bright Lines. These characters exist in the mundane, domestic version of the city rather than a romanticized, glamorous one. There is no glitz here, only broken subways and the Fairway grocery store. Klein is successful at capturing that true-to-life experience. There is that omnipresent fear that all New Yorkers have of the subway inevitably failing while under the East River. Paul literally evacuates through the subway tunnel, surrounded by rats, worried about the third rail. The novel is also filled with those specific details listing off neighborhoods, streets, and bars. Klein practically is a tour guide for Red Hook.
There are moments of sadness too. Klein teases the reader by setting up what at first appears will be a typical domestic, Brooklyn-centric, rich white people behaving badly narrative and then blows it all apart by killing off Jenny’s baby. And because Michael ultimately is the primary character the reader comes to empathize with, his forced choice between Jenny and his family with Rebecca and baby does have emotional significance. There are moments where Michael comes off as unlikeable. He seems surprised by his sudden fatherhood and endures a macho, new father emotional struggle that feels as if his missing a few late nights at the local bar is somehow akin to his lactating wife having just birthed a baby. But for the most part Michael carries the emotional struggle valiantly and the reader wants him to succeed.
Klein has deftly crafted a domestic drama twisted around an intriguing mystery and the resulting novel is fun to read while emotionally impactful. Little Disasters delivers a highly readable literary novel that confronts infidelity, the loss of a child, and the risk of bad decisions.