I set this book aside after getting into about 1/4 of it.

I don't recommend it if you don't like to read stories about middle-class white people living in suburbs, who have zero culture.
( )

I read this over the course of jury service, sat on a faux-leather chair by a formica table in a souless airport lounge of a waiting room, apprehensive that I'd be asked to do something Important. To that end, the book initially frustrated me. The stories of maths and space rang hollow; an artist playing pretend in the world of science. But the confines of juror's room meant I ploughed on. After a while the better story comes through. Loss as told through action. Tarred only by a magical character appearing in the final chapter to explain life, the universe and everything.

A qualified recommendation: start around chapter 5 and stop after chapter 19.

A character study of genius, grief, hitting bottom, and finding a way back.

Mathematical superstar Keith Corcoran has finally reached his goal of becoming an astronaut, but while assigned to the space station he receives word that his teenaged daughter has died. He is subsequently incapacitated by the first of many crippling migraines, but for various reasons he cannot be returned to Earth for months. During that time he's unable to do most of his work while, back on Earth, his wife leaves him and removes the contents of their home, leaving it for him to sell. His return, and how he copes with his grief and forced time off, forms the story.

Keith arrives home to find that his wife has, except for Keith's clothes and a couch, a bed, and a small TV, literally emptied the house. Still grieving his daughter's death, unsure if he'll ever be able to be an astronaut again, and with no confidant, he spends weeks alone, remembering and feeling guilty over his absence from his daughters life. He spends many days reading the paper at a local Starbucks, where one day he is approached by the boisterous Peter, a Ukranian immigrant who turns out to be his neighbor. Slowly they become friends, opening up about their individual pain. Peter was an un-degreed assistant astronomer at home, but here he can find work only as a stock clerk and is depressed and considering returning home. His wife, a delightful woman thoroughly in love with her husband, encourages the friendship as healthy for both men and tries to find ways to bring Keith into their family circle. As the months go by, Keith hits bottom emotionally, but then gradually turns a corner with help from Peter and family. Peter also finds a way forward that will make the move to the U.S. rewarding for him.

Because it's told from the POV of an emotionally isolated man in the midst of grieving, not really able to focus on the problem, this is a slow story to develop, but I couldn't quite stop reading it, and eventually it reeled me in. Definitely recommended. ( )

In this novel, Kiefer has created a moving story about a mathematical genius, Keith Corcoran, who manages to fulfill his life mission of being an astronaut. The only problem is that when his teenaged daughter dies in a car accident while he's on an international space station, and his wife leaves him, he is left to deal with the consequences of the isolation he always sought out. Keith is a fascinating character. He feels more connected to numbers - which he sees in colors and treats as if they have their own corporeal existence - than he does to people. He discovered early on that his daughter shares his gift, but when she becomes more interested in a regular life - dating boys and participating in cheerleading - he's disappointed with her.

After her death, he has to come back to earth and deal with his regret that his monomaniacal pursuit of his career goals took him away from his family for so many long stretches that he lost all connection to them . The house he moves back into - completely emptied of all furnishings when his wife left him with the request that he sell it - becomes a metaphor for just how empty and hollowed out his life has become. As sad as all this sounds, it's not a depressing book to read because Kiefer does a good job of getting inside Keith's head and showing how he perceives the world.

Be prepared when you read this, however, that there is a lot of lyrical writing, with very abstract language, that conveys Keith's mode of thinking. The first 40 pages alone are full of that language - as we get long descriptions of the best moment of Keith life's - when he's on a spacewalk outside the space station, installing a robotic arm that he, as an engineer, designed. It's moving and poetic - but it also takes a long while to get the main gist of the story - dealing with the aftermath of his daughter's death.

While I liked the novel very much, that was my one quibble with it - that it went down some tangential paths that aren't as compelling as the ones that flesh out the main premise of the book. I don't think it's fair to quarrel with how a writer chooses to fill out a story (but of course I will anyway) but in this case I was disappointed that he didn't deliver more background details about Keith's relationship with his daughter and his wife, and what his feelings might have been while he was locked up in the space station, unable to return to earth, until 3 months after his daughter died.

We get some of that, and when we do, they are the most powerful sections of the book - particularly the flashbacks of Keith discovering, when his daughter is very young, that she has inherited his mathematical genius and then later, during her teenaged years, when he tells her how disappointed he is that she close to lead the normal life of a teenager and not do more with her gift. With his wife, there is just a brief scene about how they met and then just brief and shrill phone conversations.

What we get a instead are a few, albeit very hot and sexy, scenes from the affair he starts with the neigbhor, and then many scenes about the friendship he strucks up with a Ukrainian immigrant he meets at a Starbucks who used to work at a Russian astronomical observatory, but who since coming to America has been underemployed as a stockboy at a Target.

Ultimately, that friendship becomes an important part of the story but for the early scenes when he keeps running into the Ukranian at a Starbucks and then rescues him when after he's passed out drunk there to the many scenes when they sit in an empty lot next to the astronauts' house watching the stars, it feels like a good chunk of the novel isn't living up to the premise the author set up.

While finding some of these sections a little slow and tedious, I couldn't help but compare it in my mind to another tale about the loss of a child told from the father's perspective that I read this summer. In the novel You Came Back by Christopher Coake, we start with a father who has just started to remake his life seven years after his son died, falling down stairs at home -- an event that led to the dissolution of his marriage. Just when he becomes engaged to the new woman in his life, a woman who bought his old house seeks him out to tell him his son's ghost in in the house, calling out to him. If you played the Stephen King game (suggested in his book on writing) of "What if" a character had to deal with this scenario, Coake delivers masterfully on every aspect you'd expect a man to have to deal with in that situation -- disbelief, anger, then a desperate wish to believe it's true, and then a a reconnection to his ex-wife when she hears the news.

In this novel about Keith's loss, I wanted to know so much more about his daughter, his relationship with his wife, and the three months he spent stuck up in the space station after she died, because conditions wouldn't let him return any sooner. By the end of the novel, though, the relationship with the Ukranian that didn't initially seem as consequential or relevant as any of those matters does play an important role in Keith's "re-entry" into life on earth. And admittedly, many of the details and story elements Kiefer choose to include fit with a man who lived so much in his head and had trouble connecting with people. Coming back to earth, Keith is forced to forge relationships -- he wants to do nothing but get back to work and lose himself into his career responsibilities, but NASA won't let him until it's obvious he's dealt with his grief and its main physical manifestation, severe migraines. The relationship with his Ukranian friend proves very important and in the last quarter of the book, their connection plays out in interesting ways. In the end, while I may not have been riveted to every single page, I still enjoyed the entire experience because the novel tells a powerful story about how one man deals with tragedy and begins to rebuild his life from the ashes of it. ( )

An astounding debut novel. Brilliant. ( )