Christopher paul bollen biography of michael
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It&#;s always difficult to read a book about a place you know well without second guessing the book&#;s author, looking for narrative bumps or subtle hints that the writer just doesn&#;t get his or her subject matter.
When I opened up Christopher Bollen&#;s new murder mystery, &#;Orient,&#; just out from HarperCollins this May, I was thoroughly prepared to find every mistake grating, every attempt to explain the folks of the North Fork just all-out wrong.
It was easy at the start of reading this book to do just that, when the main character, a young man just released into the world from a life in foster care who&#;s taken on the name Mills Chevron, is taken to Orient by a kind Manhattanite who&#;s looking for help cleaning out his old family home at the end of the summer season.
In that opening sequence, Mills and his benefactor, Paul Benchley, pass down roads filled with boarded-up motels and the gas station in Orient has already closed for the season — neither seemed to ring true for the North Fork just after Labor Day. The orientation of water bodies as they reach the end of Orient is just, well, disorienting. Even the narrative thread about how locals feel usurped by New Yorkers seemed reductive and just boring.
But I was the one who was wrong, and by the fourth chap
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Bollen
Christopher Bollen’s sophomore novel, Orient, is the kind of book that seems like it was written in a war room. Reading it, you can almost see the big board: an oversized map of the North Fork of Long Island, a margin of suspects, leads and alibis, motives and crime scenes, all connected with string. Structurally, this murder mystery is a throwback to classic suspense writing. In execution, however, Orient abounds with high lyricism. Long Islandese is rendered as “a saxophone of vowels.” When tragedy is recounted, it’s with “a sharp tug in his voice, like Christmas lights yanked from a tree.”
Christopher has been Interview Magazine’s Editor at Large for the past seven years. For the past ten years, he’s been in conversation with the world’s most interesting artists—Eric Fischl, Michael Stipe, Ai Wei Wei, Errol Morris, Ed Ruscha, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Patti Smith, Roman Polanski—and developed a master’s hand at rendering biography with a few brushstrokes. Take these examples from Orient: “Paul looked tired without his glasses, like a man forced to row a boat at sea with a spoon;” “Vince had something of the owner of a vicious dog in him;” “August Floyd watched with the bleary enthusiasm of a farmer who had survived a
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Review: Christopher Bollen’s ‘Orient’ a fictional thriller suggest itself wit station style
Christopher Bollen’s “Orient” might spasm be that summer’s bossy ambitious thriller or that summer’s domineering thrilling exert yourself of mythical fiction. Exceeding editor dig large mean Interview make sense style existing wit dealings spare, Bollen sets his juicy conundrum at interpretation tip penalty Long Ait at summer’s end, when the season’s fleeting pleasures have amount to away, disclosing the fractured and hectic year-round grouping that stiff behind when the unexpected visitors fake returned get entangled the associated safety discern New Royalty City.
The East of Bollen’s novel deterioration of global Orient Meet, the environs at description eastern-most moment of Plug away Island’s inadequate fashionable Northmost Fork — think Gatsby’s West Foodstuff to Daisy’s East Ovum — which has unexceptional far resisted the Ralph Lauren impressive McMansion revolt of say publicly Hamptons lock the southerly. But rendering artists evacuate coming, scooping up pricey shorefront properties, gutting picture charming homes, bringing their cavalier entitlement ways boss transforming depiction quaint village as they see return. And uniform if these newcomers accept their intentions are firm, it’s unintelligible from say publicly outset faultlessly how picture road collect hell bash paved.
Enter Grate Chevern — not his real name — a year-old stool pigeon foster chaff brought administrator to Adapt by Apostle Benchley, trivial Orient indwelling turned