Aerostasis
£14.99
FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF MY FATHER’S DIET AND THE AESTHETICS OF DEGRADATION
The sophomore novel from Adrian Nathan West, Aerostasis is a tale of the persistence and decay of love across three generations of an American family as the matriarch, Joan, is struck by rapid-onset dementia two years after her husband’s death. Her daughter, Lisette, an adjunct philosophy professor, leaves her work and her home to care for her mother, detailing in her journal the disintegration of the woman who raised her and learning family secrets. Lisette’s boyfriend, Henry, a mental health technician at a hospital for troubled young men, struggles with despair at the futility of his work and tries to reconcile with his impoverished roots in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, while her brother, a beverage manager at a tony suburban country club, drowns in debt and attempts to ignore his wife’s infidelities as he bonds with his precocious, rebellious son over a project to restore an antique hot air balloon.
A work of vision and piercing lyricism, Aerostasis confirms once again why Joshua Cohen has called West “one of our best novelists” and Lauren Oyler affirmed, “West captures the bizarre vividness of America better than anyone I’ve ever read.”
“Aerostasis is deep and wonderful, a book of high intelligence and grim humour and tragic-comic honesty. The way it conjures, with unforgettable texture and pathos, the inner lives of these disparate souls bound together by love and less-than-lovely circumstances reminds us of what the novel can do in the hands of a writer who understands and can harness its power. Adrian Nathan West has achieved something extraordinary here.”
—Sam Lipsyte