60-Second Critic: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country


By Ken Kalfus
(Ecco; $24.95)

If you greeted those post-9/11 trend stories about the small-scale considerateness and minor acts of blah-blah it had fostered with a general “That’ll last,” this novel from Center City writer Kalfus is the beach read for you. Joyce and Marshall Harriman, a divorcing but still


By Ken Kalfus
(Ecco; $24.95)

If you greeted those post-9/11 trend stories about the small-scale considerateness and minor acts of blah-blah it had fostered with a general “That’ll last,” this novel from Center City writer Kalfus is the beach read for you. Joyce and Marshall Harriman, a divorcing but still cohabiting couple with two young children, live in New York during the blast and briefly fantasize that the other is dead. When it’s clear both have survived, their plots to destroy one another intensify amid the paranoia of the time. This is a miserable book until it reaches an orange-alert level of satire, at which point it becomes pretty funny. New York haters and real misanthropes may be slightly bored, but my inner idealist hopes Kalfus’s novel joins the ranks of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 on the required reading lists of all the precocious middle-schoolers with parents whose value systems are a little more tribal than is societally optimal.