Collecting Sins

by Steven Sobel

Overview

Collecting Sins is a highly-charged coming-of-age novel set in the Southern California of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Steven Sobel evokes the inner environment of Ben, a sensitive and carefree youth confronting adulthood. Ben explores the labyrinth of sewers beneath the San Fernando Valley, cavorts on the sun-drenched, bikini-infested beaches of Santa Monica, and immerses himself in the hippie culture of Topanga Canyon. In the tradition of J. D. Salinger, Carolyn See, and Jay McInerney, Sobel takes us on a rollicking journey through the heady atmosphere of the era. Amplified by drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll, Vietnam, feminism, violence, and poetry. More than the story of an individual, Collecting Sins is the story of a generation before it came to power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644280089
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Steven Sobel is a native of Southern California, where he has spent the better part of a lifetime collecting sins. This is his first novel. He makes his home in the Southern California area.

Read an Excerpt

The next morning I put on a pair of cut-off corduroy pants and a t-shirt, and out of the linen closet I took the largest towel I could find. I folded the towel lengthwise into thirds and rolled it up so that I could carry it easily under my arm. I saw someone at the beach do that once. Then I walked over the freeway on-ramp, leaned against the wooden post with the sign that said no bicycles or pedestrians past that point, and I put out my thumb. I had been delayed by one day because it took so long to get the woman out of the sewers, but I was ready to start my new life. I was going to get suntanned and grow my hair long. The beach was about twenty miles from my house. To get there I had to take the freeway maybe ten miles through the hills and out of the valley and then another ten miles or so down any of a number of streets. I stood leaning against a sign post and a few cars passed before one stopped. It was a silver Lincoln Continental. The electric window on the passenger side rolled down and the driver looked over and asked, "Where are you going?"
I looked into the car and answered, "To the beach."
"That's what I figured. Get in-I'll take you part way." The driver was a guy about fifty or sixty years old, and very fat. "I'm going to put the window up," he said after I got into the car. "When you get this old and this fat, you need air conditioning on days like this."
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to laugh at that or what, so I just said, "Yeah, it's pretty hot already."
The man had some classical music playing on his radio and we just drove for a while, listening to the music and not saying anything, except that the man said, "This is Chopin. I played the piano as a child and I always wanted to play this piece."
"Did you ever play it?" I asked.
"Never did." It was beautiful music and I thought that some day I would learn all about great classical music and be able to identify music like this that came on the radio. After a while the man asked, "Are you just bumming around these days?"
"I'm on summer vacation," I answered.
"How old are you?"
"I'll be sixteen pretty soon."
"Well, that's what I'd do," he said. "If I were sixteen I'd just hitchhike to the beach. Do it while you can-before it's too late. It gets too late too fast." He sighed and said again, "That's what I'd do if I were your age." He seemed like a nice old guy, and I felt a little bad that he wasn't sixteen so he could do what he wanted. I thanked him when he let me off and he said, "Enjoy yourself."

What People are Saying About This

Aram Saroyan

Steven Sobel's Collecting Sins captures a particularly elusive moment of youth with its unconcious humor, misapplied diligence, and underlying pathos. It's a wonderful book.

Brad Sherman

The confusion of adolescence rolls through Steven Sobel's Collecting Sins like a night fog on a beach. Fifteen-year-old Ben, no longer boy, not yet man, is struck with the potential in life for greatness, and at once confronted by the foibles of "the human condition" that predelict him to commit unspeakable sins even during acts of heroism. He emerges as a solitary and isolated figure, even as his own friends disappear into the mist of the times--the maw of Vietnam, the banal emptiness of hippie philosophy and the sensory indulgences of what must be the early '70s. Even tragedy becomes mediocrity as Ben's first love affair, with a dying girl, is transfigured in the gray light of reality. Lost within himself, Ben is unaware of how much he (and the reader) experiences in this adventure that dramatically begins in the catacomb storm drains of a California city, as two boys, with a charming interpretation of Catholicism, set out on a quest to gather sins for the confessional. The writing is evocative, the subplots are refreshing, and the narrative never stalls, creating a story with an unrelenting grip. Even though this is a full novel, Sobel works in the polished, condensed pace of a short story writer--showing little of the rough edges evident in most first works. A contemporary of his fictional characters, Sobel is, by trade, a corporate lawyer, with graduate degrees in law and business from the University of Southern California. This is his first piece of published fiction, reflecting the labor of several years work wedged between child-rearing and career-tending. Collecting Sins also marks the first fiction for Santa Monica Press, a refreshing and timeless addition to its usual line of trendy how-to books.
— Congressman Brad Sherman, Sherman Oaks, CA

Howard Junker

It would be a sin not to read this book.
— (Howard Junker, Editor, Zyzzyva)

Editorial Reviews

"It would be a sin not to read this book! Collecting Sins will drain you of your innocence and condemn you to be ever grateful that writers as unblemished by piety and can't as Steven Sobel manage to exist."
—Howard Junker, editor, ZYZZYVA

"Lots of kinky action"
—Publishers Weekly

"Tackling teenage trauma from a wholly different perspective, Collecting Sins follows the darkly comic adventures of the very confused Ben, who is touchingly trying to navigate his way through the late sixties in L.A. Steven Sobel's confident debut novel is so vividly evocative, and his protagonist so honestly etched, you'll be imagining the sequel before it even ends!"
—Marie Claire

From the Publisher

The writing is evocative, the subplots are refreshing and the narrative never stalls, creating a story with an unrelenting grip.
— ForeWord Magazine

Paige St. John

Sobel has written a tightly focused and moving portrait of a 15-year-old growing up in Los Angeles . . . Sobel seems to remember something easy to forget as one shudderingly shrugs off one's adolescence: that the discovery of the perverted, the uncaring, the unfair, brings wiht it a thrill of knowledge as much as it does the sting of disillusionment.
— San Francisco Chroncile Book Review

Jeanne Fay

Steven Sobel's confident debut novel is so vividly evocative, and his protagonist so honestly etched, you'll be imagining the sequel before it even ends.

Marie Claire

An instant page turner ... The story is instantly engaing, chock full of plot twists ...

Undergraduate Reporter