Summary and Reviews of Crossing California by Adam Langer

Crossing California by Adam Langer

Crossing California

by Adam Langer
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 2004, 448 pages
  • Paperback:
  • May 2005, 512 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Poignant, ambitious, and tremendously fun, Crossing California is a novel about two generations of family and friendship; set in Chicago, from November 1979 through January 1981.

In 1979 California Avenue, in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood, separates the upper-middle-class Jewish families from the mostly middle-class Jewish residents on the east of the divide. This by turns funny and heartbreaking first novel tells the story of three families and their teenage children living on either side of California, following their loves, heartaches, and friendships during a memorable moment of American history. Langer's captivating portraits, his uncanny and extraordinarily vivid recreation of a not-so-past time and place, and his pitch-perfect dialogue all make Crossing California certain to evoke memories and longing in its readers--as well as laughter and anxiety.

Whether viewed as an American Graffiti for the seventies, The (Jewish) Corrections, a Chicagoan Manhattan, or early Philip Roth for a later generation, Crossing California is an unforgettable, and thoroughly enjoyable, contribution to contemporary fiction.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Chicago Sun-Times
...closing the book...is the worst part of this engrossing debut novel.

Chicago Tribune
...the most vivid novel about Chicago since Saul Bellow's Herzog and the most ambitious debut...since Philip Roth's Letting Go.

People
...Langer drills to the core of people...as deeply as Jonathan Franzen did in The Corrections.... [4 stars]

The New York Times - Mark Kamine
… [Langer's] ambitious first novel, Crossing California, hits high points of comic empathy.

Booklist - Donna Seaman
Although Langer may have aimed for Philip Roth and landed, instead, beside David Sedaris, his novel is smart, affectionate, and uproariously entertaining.

Kirkus Reviews
Two years, 1979-81, in the lives of two Chicago families-but so much more....Of epic scope, yet intimate in its accomplishments.

Publishers Weekly
His steely humanism balances the corruptions of ego against an appreciation of the energies of its schemes, putting him firmly in the tradition of such Chicago writers as Bellow and Dybek.

Author Blurb Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook
A work of unusual mastery, compassion, insight and wit.

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Read-Alikes

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