Alki

With his literary novel Alki, Christopher Anderson joins the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver in achieving an American realist-minimalist tour de force. Through the vivid details of complex characters forging their paths forward in modern America, Anderson paints a portrait of a generation. In the summer of 1968, on Alki Beach in West Seattle, two young Vietnam veterans cement a lifelong friendship. As their lives unfold through the decades, they face challenges that their war experience only makes more difficult. Jackson is a deserter and an addict, someone destined to kill himself with booze, who lives on disability payments. Peter's addiction is to sex. Hounded by ADD and PTSD—and abetted by a sociopathic charm—he throws away his time on a stream of lovers, each another blow to his marriage and his university career. At the center of this novel of ideas is Peter’s writing. His Vietnam novel Oldone takes shape slowly, its pages written and rewritten, revised to obsessive perfection. The effects of infidelity, of drinking and drugging, and of failure to pursue a life’s dream are laid out realistically. Yet not every punishment, whether it’s comic or tragic, is equal to the crime. Alki offers intriguing twists and startling outcomes, outcomes that nevertheless will strike the reader with the sense of inevitability of a fully realized novel.