Hounding for Skipwaves

9781419628047

1419628046

Hounding for Skipwaves opens in the Pacific during the last years of World War II with a recounting of the experiences of the protagonist's father, who ran away from home at the age of 17 to enlist in the Army. After the war, he returns to New York, where he and his wife have a son'”an "A-bomb baby" born the same day the Enola Gay levels Nagasaki. At the age of ten, the boy begins having premonitory visions that he comes to realize are actually summoning different versions of reality. Terrified by the power of this ability, he wishes it away, but it returns in midlife, around 1980, to plague him with visions of the World Trade Center disaster and other sudden rifts in the fabric of experience that he can't understand and soon can't control. An acclaimed novelist living an increasingly troubled personal life, he meets and eventually marries a beautiful and gifted principal dancer with New York City Ballet, but his brooding anger sullies his marriage and eventually compels him to confront his need for an enemy, his lifelong hatred for his father, and the bizarre fugue states that have taken over his life. The narrative, in the style of "magical realism," makes several quantum jumps in and out of fantastic dreams and alternative realities, including one in which the protagonist is bayoneted in an alley by a rogue World War II Japanese soldier, another in which he becomes president of the United States briefly, and a third in which he runs into a character in one of his novels, with each insisting that the other is imaginary. The story ends with a final, unexpected jump that takes place at the World Trade Center on the fateful morning of September 11, 2001.