From the author of Glass Bottle Season comes a gritty new coming-of-age novel that examines what happens when one man’s desperate journey to become a New York Writer leaves him more “tortured” than “artist.” Sidewalk Dance is a portrait of the artist as a deluded self-saboteur. Haunted by his brother’s tragic death in the War in Afghanistan and unable to process this trauma, Fisher shuns his elitist pedigree by abruptly quitting Yale Law School, changing his name to Fish, and moving to New York City. Once there, he sets about reinventing himself as a doomed playwright. Unfortunately for Fish, he is more of an idealist than a talent; a dreamer more than a doer. His delusions of grandeur quickly lead him into an abyss of self-doubt, addiction, identity crisis, and isolation.
The pregnancy of his would-be muse, Madame Meticulous, the debaucherous tendencies of his alter ego, Partiboy, and the impending destruction of the Hell’s Kitchen art gallery where he works combine to complicate Fish’s pursuit of literary legacy. His central delusion is that by cloaking himself in the trappings and lifestyle of the tortured artist (hurling his iPhone off the Brooklyn Bridge, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, growing out his hair, drunkenly clobbering a typewriter late at night), he will somehow become one. As paternity, unemployment, creative sterility, and romantic abandonment loom, Fish clings to a misguided hope that the staging of his play will make all well again.
