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The Astral

The Astral

by Kate Christensen

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group | June 12, 2012 | Trade Paperback

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In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry's floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz's arms-and back to his better self-in a novel that is funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving.

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The Astral

The Astral

by Kate Christensen

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From the Publisher

In the gentrifying neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, rests a huge rose-colored apartment building called The Astral. For decades it was the happy home of the poet Harry Quirk, his wife, Luz, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But when Luz finds poems that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, Harry is summarily kicked out, leaving him to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, and parental failures. With tremendous grace and acute perception, Kate Christensen details Harry's floundering attempts to find his way back into Luz's arms-and back to his better self-in a novel that is funny, bittersweet, and terrifically moving.

Bookclub Guide

Kate Christensen  is the author of five previous novels, most recently Trouble. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publica­tions, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, Elle, and Open City. She lives in New York City.

1. Harry Quirk's obsession with his imploding marriage forms a central arc in The Astral.  Do you trust his narrative of the marriage and its dissolution?  How does your opinion of him evolve as you read the novel?

2. Luz is convinced that Harry is sleeping with Marion.  Although her accusations of sexual intimacy are unfounded, Harry and Marion are very close friends.  Do you think that it is possible to commit emotional infidelity, and if so, is Harry guilty of it?  How would you define an "emotional affair"? 

3. In Chapter Fourteen, Harry visits his wife's therapist, Helen.  What do you make of Harry's animosity towards her?  Why do you think the author included this confrontation? 

4. Harry's work-in-progress, "an epic poem of loss and displacement," is titled The Astral.  How does this echo the symbolic role of The Astral apartment building in the novel?

5. During the course of the novel, Harry and Karina pay several visits to Hector at the Sag Harbor compound.  How do these experiences compare, and what do they contribute to our understanding of Hector and his situation?  Do you think Hector is a true believer of the Children of Hashem cult, or is he an opportunist like his older consort Christa?

6. The Astral portrays a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, rapidly changing Brooklyn of artists, artisans, immigrants, and long-settled locals.  Discuss the tensions inherent in such a quilt of social types.  How does the author portray the interactions between immigration and gentrification?

7. Kate Christensen once wrote an influential essay titled "Loser Lit" in praise of such books as Lucky Jim, A Confederacy of Dunces, Jernigan and Wonder Boys, whose books center on self-defeating characters whose often comic misadventures as they slide to the bottom have garnered these novels fervent cult followings. To what extent do you think Harry Quirk qualifies as a Loser Lit antihero? 

Format: Trade Paperback

Dimensions: 320 Pages, 5.12 × 7.87 × 0.39 in

Published: June 12, 2012

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Language: English

The following ISBNs are associated with this title:

ISBN - 10: 030747335X

ISBN - 13: 9780307473356

Read from the Book

Chapter One Toxic water streamed with gold like the belly of a turning fish: sunset over Newtown Creek. Tattered pinkish-black clouds blew overhead in the March wind. The water below me rippled with tendons and cowlicks. Just across the brief waterway were the low mute banks of Hunters Point, church spire, low-slung old warehouses. An empty barge made its way down the creek toward the East River and the long glittering skyscrapery isle. I stood behind the chain-link fence the city had slapped up to keep the likes of me from jumping in. I was hungry and in need of a bath and a drink. At my back thronged the dark ghosts of Greenpoint, feeding silently off the underwater lake of spilled oil that lay under it all, the polyfluorocarbons from the industrial warehouses. I had named this place the End of the World years ago, when it was an even more polluted, hopeless wasteland, but it still fit. As I stood staring out through the webbing of fence, my mind cast itself through the rivulets of my own lost verse. I netted little flashes of lines and phrases I’d been reworking, “Held spellbound, your mollusk voice / Quietly swathing my cochlea / In tentacles of damask cloth” and “Slow-weathered verdigris of our once bronzed thighs,” but they sounded dead to me now. All I could really hear was Luz, Luz, Luz like the feeble pulsing signals of a dying heart. Heartache was a physical thing, a pain in my chest, a sort of recoiling tension with an ache like a brui
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From the Critics

“Spectacular. . . .  The Astral , artfully composed and emotionally tender, is evidence of true literary genius.” — The Miami Herald    “Impossible to put down. . . . Harry Quirk, living up to his own name, is a gem.” — The Oregonian    “ The Astral is a work of art, a prose poem, and a finely told tale. . . . [A] tender, aching marvel of a book.” — The Huffington Post   “An ode to Brooklyn and broken marriages, endings and beginnings, and the spaces in between.” — The Boston Globe   “Christensen has somehow—again—created a captivatingly believable male narrator.” — The Washington Post    “An object lesson on the current realist novel. . . . The Astral is structured as a journey—a poet’s trip through an interior and exterior landscape—and Christensen manages each step with quiet deliberation.” — The New York Times Book Review   “[Christensen’s] characters’ ruminations on how the forces of love and deception work in tandem within a relationship are both searing and concise. . . . [She] is a forceful writer whose talent is all over the page. Her prose is visceral and poetic, like being bludgeoned with an exquisitely painted sledgehammer. She is a portrait artist, drawing in miniature, capturing the light within.” — San Francisco Chronicle   “A tart, com
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About the Author

Kate Christensen  is the author of five previous novels, most recently Trouble. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publica­tions, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, Elle, and Open City. She lives in New York City.
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