cover image Quaspeck

Quaspeck

Eric Gabriel Lehman. Mercury House, $20 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-56279-036-3

Lehman's raw, unsparing novel portrays an upstate New York family torn apart by political, emotional and sexual conflict in the early 1970s. Moody ex-hippie Carl Gajewski leads a citizens' coalition against a developer who plans to transform Quaspeck Lake into a glitzy resort. This puts him on a collision course with his estranged father, Walter, an unemployed construction worker whose new job with the developer will require him to bulldoze Carl's lakefront home. Meanwhile, Carl's seemingly tough sister Cee botches a suicide attempt, quits college and then finds herself pregnant by an ex-junkie and promiscuous homosexual. Trying to deny his own homosexual urges, Jason, the third Gajewski sibling, rapes his girlfriend and then escapes to Greenwich Village's gay underground. With the same gritty realism that informed his first novel, Waterboys (published under the pen name Eric Gabriel), Lehman depicts troubled people oscillating between explosive anger and attempts to heal. His telling observations on family dysfunction, college rituals and political correctness '70s-style make this a cathartic trip. (Aug.)