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    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel
    Unavailable
    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel
    Unavailable
    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel
    Ebook273 pages3 hours

    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel

    By Ken Kalfus

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A National Book Award Finalist

    "The best novel yet about 9/11.... A brilliant new comedy of manners, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own." —Salon

    “Savagely hilarious.” —Elle

    Joyce and Marshall each think the other is killed on September 11—and must swallow their disappointment when the other arrives home. As their bitter divorce is further complicated by anthrax scares, suicide bombs, and foreign wars, they suffer, in ways unexpectedly personal and increasingly ludicrous, the many strange ravages of our time.

    In this astonishing black comedy, Kalfus suggests how our nation’s public calamities have encroached upon our most private illusions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 24, 2009
    ISBN9780061856341
    Unavailable
    A Disorder Peculiar to the Country: A Novel
    Author

    Ken Kalfus

    ken kalfus is the author of a novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the short story collections Thirst, which won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

    Read more from Ken Kalfus

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    Reviews for A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

    3.5/5

    114 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      A bit all over the place, but interesting. The set-up is the thing: a man and his wife both think the other died in 9/11 but neither actually did, plus they want a divorce. Oh well.
    • 2/5
      The idea of this book was really good: we see a married couple in a bad divorce, with 9/11 in the background. However, for me the divorce and 9/11 stayed two separate story lines, both of which were not executed very well. The fighting is at times ridiculous, and makes the husband and wife unsympathetic, because they completely ignore their kids in this. You can feal some of the despair of 9/11, but that is overshadowed by the divorce. All in all, it would have been better if there was more focus on one thing in this book.
    • 4/5
      An excellent dissection of the influence of the strain of a post-9/11 world on a marriage. The writing is crisp, the dialog realistic. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Quick read and at times amazingly disturbing. War of the Roses meets post 9/11 times. Some scenes, like the children playing jumping off the tower will be long remembered.
    • 4/5
      I went into this book knowing the basics of the plot, but I was still surprised by some of the things that I encountered. At times, I could not understand how the main characters acted - but having never gone through a divorce, much less an ugly divorce, I suppose I shouldn't have expected myself to.It was a very well written novel, but the end, for me, left a lot to be desired.
    • 3/5
      It's hard to imagine 2 people hating each other as much as Joyce and Marshall after 15 years of marriage and 2 children but Kalfus allows for some comic relief, dark though it be. For instance, being a survivor of the World Trade Center disaster and intrigued over suicide bombers and their hope for martydom, Marshall builds himself a bomb, has difficulty strapping it onto his waist so he enlists help from Marsha and the kids. They are all oblivious to the peril involved in this task! In a particularly poignant chapter, it slowly dawns on the 5 year old Viola just what is going on with her parents. Kalfus writes with a tautness that keeps this story moving along at a clip. There is little redemption at the end but a note of hopefulness creeps in with a most unexpected conclusion.
    • 3/5
      A very good, but flawed novel from Ken Kalfus. His attempt at black comedy has a few moments that work. Aside from that the novel fails to give the reader sufficient reasons to continue reading. Thankfully, it is short and, as a result, I was able to make it to the end. The author gets points for trying, but he ultimately fails to achieve the excellence he demonstrated in his previous novel, [The Commissariat of Enlightenment].
    • 4/5
      In a rush to read all the National Book Award nominees before the award is announced (impossible -- the award is announced tonight), I picked this one up because it's the shortest of the remaining books and I thought I could power through it and maybe have more context for the award.It's a weird one. It uses September 11, 2001, as a metaphor for the acrimonious dissolution of a marriage, both as sign and symbol, so that, for example the husband worked in the South Tower of the WTC but was late for work and so was *in* the building but got out. The wife was supposed to be on the Newark/SFO flight but her meeting got cancelled while she was on the way to the airport. So like right up front you see these two people learning that their soon-to-be-divorced spouse *likely* died, and how happy that makes them. It's a weird spin on things.Then the kids (2 and 4) play incessant games of World Trade Center where they hold hands and jump off things in a "suicide pack."It's so close to being amusing, but it isn't, really. Everyone's at each other's throat, and I'm finding it kind of tedious. I think it was a good thought to take the universal and make it particular, but I still think that Jonathan Safran Foer was WAY more successful at this in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.