Here They Come

by Yannick Murphy

Overview

Here They Come is the lyrical, startling and poignant third novel from Yannick Murphy, a National Endowment for the Arts award winner and one of the freshest voices in American fiction today. Splitting time between a ramshackle apartment and a lonely hot dog vendor, the observant thirteen-year-old who stands steadily at the center of Here They Come gives lyrical voice to an unforgettable instant —1970s New York, stifling, violent and full of life. Balanced between her enigmatic siblings, detached parents, and a quiet sense of the surreal, she recounts a year of startling moments with dark humor and deadpan resilience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802143198
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/10/2007
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

Told by a precocious unnamed 13-year-old girl who bends spoons with her mind, Murphy's gorgeous third book of fiction recounts the story of a poor family's coming-of-age in 1970s New York. The young protagonist's world is populated by idiosyncratic characters, including her equally precocious sisters Jody and Louisa; her also unnamed suicidal musician brother, who keeps a shotgun in his room; her depressed but strong-willed mother; her ailing and confusedly nostalgic grandmother Ma Mere, and John, the hotdog vendor on the corner who trades Hershey bars for a chance to cop a feel. When Cal, her gambling, deadbeat dad, who lives with his new girlfriend, "the slut," goes missing, the family bands together to find him and tries to survive in a world where they can't catch a break. The brother and the girlfriend travel to Spain on a tip that Cal might be there. The others stay home, struggling through the trials of adolescence, single parenthood and deprivation. In thick, poetic prose that edges toward stream of consciousness and is peppered with slightly surreal details, Murphy (The Sea of Trees, 1997) creates a world as magical and harrowing as the struggle to come to grips with maturity. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

From deep in the trenches of family dysfunctionality, this story magnifies the weird but absorbing life of a girl coping with a broken home in a broken landscape. In a setting that seems like the underbelly of lower Manhattan, this first-person, present-tense narrative follows the days of the 13-year-old mostly anonymous protagonist. She lives in abject poverty and desolation with her mother and siblings, as garbage piles up in their loft and they piece together dinners of rice and mayonnaise. The father has moved out with a girlfriend, school seems to be a nonevent (only gym and shop are mentioned), but the girl has developed an attachment to a Middle Eastern hot dog vendor to whom she grants innocent sorts of sexual favors. The main story line develops around the absurd search for the father, who suddenly drops out of sight; also featured is the maternal grandmother, who moves into the family's loft as an invalid ready to drink herself to death. But the essence of the work is the impressionistic smaller scenes, the bickering with siblings, the dialog of numbness and confusion, and the tiny increments of perception and understanding. Not intended as a realistic portrait of troubled family life, this readable work is successful on its own terms, at once funny and sad. Recommended for fiction collections.-Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A skewed portrait of a collapsing New York City family, told through the eyes of a pubescent girl. Murphy's follow-up to her debut novel, Sea of Trees (1997), has something not unlike a plot: The unnamed narrator (her last name's Smith, and the clerk at the A&P calls her "Smitty") attempts to keep her family together after her father, who's left for another woman, mysteriously disappears. Smitty has her work cut out for her, given that her mother is constantly broke, her brother is a suicidal pothead guitarist, her two sisters are apparently powerless and her ailing grandmother has moved into their apartment-which, by the way, is miserably stacked full of garbage because nobody can afford to have it removed. Sad stuff on the face of it, but it's never clear if Murphy wants to play this as tragedy, absurdist comedy or something in between. Smitty herself is hard to get a read on: She casually peppers her statements with the f-word and calls her father's new girlfriend "the slut," but none of it makes her seem tough, but more like grimly lackadaisical. She hangs out with John, who runs a hot-dog stand; he routinely feels Smitty up, though that doesn't stop her from continuing to visit him. This joyless, inchoate tale is salvaged somewhat by Murphy's skill for lovely imagery: Cornsilk strands hang off Smitty's father's arms "like tassels from a cowboy's suede coat"; the shop teacher covered in filings "glows with all his metal shining." But the book is more an assortment of cobbled-together episodes and observations than a coherent story. Just as the search for the absent father begins to gather steam, random plot twists intrude-a long-lost aunt arrives, Smitty learns to bend spoons with hermind. Perhaps there's a postmodern, anti-narrative commentary buried within all this, but only the most generous reader will care to hunt for it. Diffuse, disjointed and ultimately tiresome.

Kirkus Reviews