A Familiar Beast
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: Though this slender paperback has the look and feel of an overstuffed (if menacing) greeting card, there’s nothing slight about the emotional muddle navigated by sulky, “recently disgraced” Marcus in the wake of his calamitous, ill-timed affair. Estranged from his wife and their newborn child, Marcus makes a desperate, half-thought-out visit to a childhood friend who’s had fluky success in tech and lives in an enormous but mostly empty house in a North Carolina suburb. Panio Gianopoulos’s subtly suspenseful debut elegantly explores the sorrowful angst of a certain species of modern man, the kind who doesn’t quite know what itmeansto be a man. (Gianopoulos's wife, the actor Molly Ringwald, explored some similar themes in her recent collection,When It Happens to You). "You’re a shadow of a man," a woman snarls at Marcus after they meet at a bar and she hears his story. Marcus knows she's right. "Had he learned anything?" he asks himself, searching for some measure of relief.  --Neal Thompson