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Crossing California by Adam Langer

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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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