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Charleston Post and Courier -- Sunday, August 8,
2004 -- Characters matter in Langer's debut novel -- CROSSING
CALIFORNIA. By Adam Langer. Riverhead. 432 pages. $24.95.--
"Crossing California," Adam Langer's smart, crowded and often funny
debut novel, centers on the intersecting lives of three Chicago
families from Nov. 4, 1979 to Jan. 20, 1981, the exact dates of the
hostage crisis in Iran. While the hostage crisis background might
suggest certain automatic themes -- entrapment and helplessness, for
instance -- Langer doesn't really go there...
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Los Angeles Times - July 25, 2004 -- FIRST FICTION
-- By Mark Rozzo -- Crossing California, Adam Langer --
Riverhead Books: 434 pp., $24.95 -- Toward the back end of Adam
Langer's extraordinary first novel, Muley Scott Wills - a
multiethnic and multi-tasking Chicago teenager who is, in some ways,
the soul of the book - is busy cooking up yet another movie project,
"one for which he was trying to film every inch of West Rogers
Park." In Muley's precociously fecund mind, his homemade opus
(peopled with his assorted friends) "would create a new
animated world, one that would illustrate all the invisible borders
that existed between them." Langer's project is no less
audacious...
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Pittsburgh Post Gazette -- Sunday, July 18, 2004
-- Teens' tale transports readers to late 1970s -- A focus on
families -- By Sharon Dilworth -- At the end of Adam Langer's
wickedly funny first novel is a "Glossary of Selected
Terms," in which fads are translated, names are identified and
products are given new cultural context. --
CROSSING CALIFORNIA - By Adam Langer -- Riverhead Books ($24.95) --
"Champagne Snowball": a partner-switching dance involving
smooching. Popular at bar and bat mitzvahs. "Zeppelin,
Led": influential rock band that had the good taste to disband
after the death of drummer John Bonham...
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The Times Picayune -- Tuesday, July 13, 2004 --
By Susan Larson -- Book editor -- Adam
Langer's 'Crossing California' (Riverhead Books, $24.95) is pure delight,
recreating a mostly Jewish neighborhood in Chicago in the 1970s, bissected
by a street called California, the dividing line between upper and middle
class housing.
The plot centers on three very different families. Charlie Wasserstrom is
an easygoing (perhaps too easygoing for his own good) widower and father
of two girls, Michelle and Jill. Michelle wants to be an actress and has
the girlish sophistication that such an aspiration requires -- she sees
through the lecherous high school teacher, but finds herself oddly drawn
to an awkward contemporary...
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Chicago Tribune -- July 11, 2004 Sunday -- North
Side story; Chicago's West Rogers Park is the setting for a vivid
novel that captures the pathos of life -- By James Atlas -- Crossing
California -- By Adam Langer
Riverhead, 432 pages, $24.95 -- "Crossing California" is
the most vivid novel about Chicago since Saul Bellow's
"Herzog" and the most ambitious debut set in Chicago since
Philip Roth's "Letting Go." Is this too generous, too
blurb-prone, too much the excited response of a reader who
recognizes in a book so many details from his own life, portrayed
with such exactitude, that the experience of reading it feels at
times like daydreaming?...
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The Oregonian -- Sunday, June 20, 2004 -- Rockin'
yeshiva boy takes a stroll down memory lane -- An extraordinary cast
of vivid characters fills an audacious novel -- By Steve Duin --
It was bad enough, Larry Rovner thought, that he'd agreed to spend
New Year's Eve at Latkafest with Missy Eisenstaedt and her little
sister. It was even worse that his rock band -- Rovner! -- broke up
and he had to contemplate going solo in that upcoming gig at the
Purim carnival. But what finally sent him over the edge was when he
snuck into the JCC pool just before midnight and, through the haze
of chlorine and marijuana, glimpsed Myra Tuchbaum dancing naked on
the diving board with her high-school music teacher...
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Newsday, June 20, 2004 -- BOOK REVIEW -- The kids
are alright -- By Claire Dederer -- CROSSING CALIFORNIA, by Adam
Langer. Riverhead, 432 pp., $24.95. -- First things first:
"Crossing California" is about Chicago, not California.
Adam Langer has given us a teeming, hilarious, ambitious and almost
blindingly vivid portrait of a very particular Chicago at a very
particular time: the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of West
Rogers Park during the period of the Iran hostage crisis. The
California in question is a thoroughfare: "the first of two
east-west dividing lines in West Rogers Park." The street
provides a class line for the neighborhood: "or the most part,
everything west of California was pristine and white-collar and
Jewish, or Indian, Italian, Filipino or Korean...
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Entertainment Weekly, June 18, 2004 -- Editor’s
Choice -- Crossing California, Adam Langer -- Debut Novel
(Riverhead, $24.95) -- It’s 1979. Jimmy Carter is president and
some 70 Americans have been taken hostage in Iran. In a Chicago
Jewish neighborhood, Ayatollah-defending Jill Wasserstrom is
dreading the bar mitzvah her recently widowed father is forcing on
her. She gets no sympathy from her stoner sister, Michelle, an
aspiring actress who, as a prank, impersonates a made-up relative of
Muley Wills, a gentle filmmaker with a crush on Jill who, by the
way, can’t stand her kleptomaniacal anorexic neighbor Lana Rovner
and Lana’s horny brother Larry...
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St. Louis Post Dispatch -- June 13, 2004 --
Crossing California --
by Thomas Crone -- Characters
in Adam Langer's "Crossing California" don't simply pull a box
of cereal from the shelf in the morning. They ponder all the possible
options first. They wonder about the designs on the box. They question
whether the milk's bad and debate that possibility with a relative.
After a few pages of uncertainty and conversation, maybe then they
actually start to eat breakfast.
This is a dense novel, given to a high amount of (seemingly) trivial
detail, with layer after layer of backstory developed for a large cast of
ensemble characters. What's most amazing about Langer's tendency to pack
in the information is the fact that it so completely works...
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San Francisco Chronicle -- Sunday, June 13, 2004 --
Crossing California By Adam Langer -- RIVERHEAD BOOKS; 433
PAGES; $24.95 -- Adam Langer's first novel, "Crossing
California," will undoubtedly be promoted and praised as one of
the better recent coming-of-age works of fiction, but to slip it
into a neat little category is a disservice. The characters who live
this story are doctors, cleaning women, teachers, therapists and
their children; a mix of neighborhood folk occasionally sharing, but
more often avoiding, the emotional, political and familial demands
of a tumultuous and transitional time in American history. That
would be the 400- plus days of 1979-80 when Americans were being
held hostage in Iran, Jimmy Carter was being voted out and Ronald
Reagan voted in...
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People Magazine, June 7, 2004 -- A Four-Star and
Critic’s Choice Review for CROSSING CALIFORNIA by Adam Langer - By
Kyle Smith - There isn’t much plot to this slice-of-life study,
but what a heaping slice it is. Langer drills to the core of
people-five gifted teens and their clueless elders in 1971-81
Chicago-as deeply as Jonathan Franzen did in The Corrections,
and like Franzen, Langer is going to need a trophy case...
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Christian Science Monitor -- June 01, 2004 -- CROSSING
CALIFORNIA -- By Adam Langer -- Riverhead Books -- 432 pp., $24.95
-- The road from innocence to experience -- No
one escapes the wit or wrath of Adam Langer's satire of Chicago
families in the late 1970s -- By Ron Charles -- Adam Langer's
debut novel, "Crossing California," should come with a
warning label: "Abandon all nostalgia, ye who enter here."
His story about three Chicago families during the waning years of
Jimmy Carter's presidency is brutally funny. But any fondness the
fashion industry may be tempting you to feel for that goofy period
is stripped away by Langer's acerbic re-creation of the era when
America withered under the Iran hostage crisis, high school drug use
spiked, and teenage sexual experience began to accelerate
dramatically...
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Bookpage - June 2004 -- A snapshot of suburbia -- Crossing
California -- By Adam Langer --
Riverhead, $24.95 -- 448 pages, ISBN 1573222747 -- Review By
Amy Scribner -- So it's 1979. Ronald Reagan is about to take over
the presidency. Hostages are being held at the U.S. Embassy in
Tehran. Rod Stewart rules the airwaves. It's a strange, strange time
to be growing up, and Adam Langer captures it pitch-perfectly in his
epic first novel, Crossing California...
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Chicago Sun Times -- May 30, 2004 -- The masque of
W. Rogers Park -- by Roger Gathman -- CROSSING CALIFORNIA by
Adam Langer - Riverhead. $24.95. - Its author, a
journalist, playwright and filmmaker, has been a Chicago Reader
theater critic and was a senior editor at the old Book Magazine. He
knows his Chicago; he grew up in West Rogers Park. Instead of
spending one night in a woods outside Athens, his characters swarm
through high school plays, a synagogue carnival, a bat mitvah, a pot
smoker's spot in a park, and other local habitations in search of
the objects of their desires. Instead of an aristocratic order being
threatened and restored, as it is in Shakespeare's play...
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GQ Magazine -- May 2004 -- BOOK -- Crossing
California -- Adam Langer (Riverhead) -- To my great surprise, Crossing
California made me want to go back to Hebrew School-and I hated
Hebrew school, ineffably. Yet Langer's prose is so transporting and
restorative, it makes adolescence-Jewish or otherwise-seem like an
experience to be coveted. Set between 1979 and 1981, a period of
political and cultural flux portrayed by Langer with anthropological
exactitude, California tells the story of three disparate
Chicago-area families...
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Publishers Weekly -- Starred Review -- April 26,
2004 -- Crossing California -- Langer, Adam -- ISBN:
1-57-322274-7 -- Riverhead Books -- Hardcover $24.95 -- 2004/06 --
In Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood in 1979, California
Avenue divides the prosperous west side from the struggling east.
Langer's brilliant debut uses that divide as a metaphor for the
changes that occur in the lives of three neighborhood families: the
Rovners, the Wasserstroms and the Wills. There are two
macro-stories-the courtship of Charlie Wasserstrom and Gail Shiffler-Bass,
and the alienation of Jill Wasserstrom from her best friend, Muley
Wills-but what really counts here is the exuberance of overlapping
subplots...
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Kirkus -- Starred Review -- April 15, 2004 -- "Two
years, 1979-81, in the lives of two Chicago families--but so much
more. In a reversal from the standard geographic/economic measuring
stick in the Windy City--the closer you are to Lake Michigan, the
richer you are--the North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park starts
looking a whole lot nicer once you cross west over California
Avenue. Fortunately, though, journalist/playwright Langer is less
interested in mining the neighborhood's socioeconomic strata
(primarily Jewish, with divisions still quite sharp between those
who are just middle-class and those who are professionals, living
across California) than he is in telling the story of the maturer-than-usual
teenagers and strangely childlike adults of Roger Park's Wasserstrom,
Wills, and Rovner clans...
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Publishers Weekly January 26, 2004 -- Adam
Langer -- Crossing California Riverhead, June -- Adam Langer
remembers exactly when he started writing his debut novel, Crossing
California. It was New Year's Eve, 2001; Langer had a cold and
no big plans, so he started reading Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse. He admits that he never really "got" Woolf
before, but this encounter inspired him to start writing a short
story the next day. "It was about three characters meeting on a
street corner in Chicago," he tells PW. The
"California" in the title refers to the street that served
as a line of demarcation between middle class and upper middle class
families in the Windy City neighborhood where Langer grew up.
"Crossing California seemed like a really big deal," he
explains. "There was a sense that once you cross California
everything was okay..."
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