The premise behind Eli Gottlieb's novel "Now You See Him" has a familiar ring: talented young scribe finds literary success in the big city, leaving his old pals behind until his fateful homecoming.
Variations on that theme abound, from the classic Thomas Wolfe novel "You Can't Go Home Again" to the mundane TV series "October Road." Yet when Gottlieb uses the outline to tell the story of an on-the-verge writer and the effect of his return on his best friend and other satellite characters, he combines those elements into a work of literary suspense that brings unexpected surprises.
The writer, Rob Castor, became "a minor cult celebrity in his mid-twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid sleepy upstate New York town," not unlike Monarch, N.Y., where he was born and raised. But we soon learn that a dozen years later, the literary supernova has fallen, consumed by his obsessive love for estranged girlfriend Kate Pierce, a writer on the cusp of her own success whom Rob murders in her apartment in New York City before returning home and taking his own life.
Or so we're told. Chief witness and narrator to Rob's dark deeds is Nick Framingham, a middle-aged Monarch man with a wife, two kids and a steady job. Although their lives took dramatically different paths, he adores Rob, the best friend who grew up across the street from the Framinghams, and Nick freely confesses that with "the slavish adoration of a child, I'd tried briefly to be him." At first, Nick entertains with his wry observations of the media madness that infects the stolid citizens of Monarch, who have leveraged the tragedy of Rob Castor's decline and death into their 15 minutes of fame.
There's Major Wilkinson, a stalwart World War II veteran, who suddenly buys a new wardrobe and poses for the cameras in front of the local Krispy Kreme "like a Wal-Mart greeter gone mad," and Mac Sterling, a New York City-based celebrity magazine writer who spins his childhood relationship with the dead man into a contract for the definitive Rob Castor biography. Gradually the barroom reveries about Rob's prowess with women or the surprising role Kate's new lover, billionaire David Framkin, plays in sealing her fate, give way to an exploration of Nick and the secrets that lie just below the surface of his and Rob's lives.
