Tottenville Review

In Alina Bronsky’s debut novel, Broken Glass Park, a tough seventeen-year-old is confronted with a series of horrifying, adult, and human nemeses.  In an age when fictional teenage protagonists seem mainly to do battle with vampires and prep school bullies, this alone is enough to shock the reader.  But Bronsky goes further, and makes her street-savvy seventeen-year-old a girl; in doing so, she turns an old archetype—the “angry young man” established early in books like Catcher in the Rye—into something interesting and new.

Continue reading "Broken Glass Park’s Refreshing Archetype: The Angry Young Woman"…

Last year’s Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance Festival, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public, is a cautionary documentary about the course of technological progress. The film follows delusional internet visionary Josh Harris staging elaborate productions, such as a web-cam-riddled underground world where he houses a group of New Yorkers in the months leading up to Y2K. Ten years on the message still resonates with our present anxieties since Harris’ predictions have come to startling fruition. In current works of cautionary art we see that technology’s biggest proponents are also the greatest of pessimists. These artists chronicle the history of progress—its breakthrough inventions, its disappointments and legacies—with a skeptical view towards the future.

Teddy Wayne’s debut novel, Kapitoil, is one such reflection that begs the reader to consider our uncertain transition into a new decade. Wayne takes us back to meditate on the sentiment and challenges of the end of the millennium—the impending economic collapse driven by the dotcom bubble, increasingly complex global market dynamics, and most poignantly, the way human relationships are manipulated within these contemporary stresses.
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School, we are often told, is a world apart—it’s a place to practice, to make mistakes, to try on different roles. And so when the complications of the real world encroach upon the idyll of school life—when, say, a teacher seduces his underage student—concerned adults rush in to preserve the school’s sheltered atmosphere, armed with counseling sessions and healing phrases. It’s an impulse Eleanor Catton sends up quite wittily in her debut novel, The Rehearsal. She knows as well as we do that school was never safe to begin with, and that its teenage inhabitants are drama addicts who live for scandal.
Continue reading "Schooled in Scandal"…