Daniel Turtel’s debut novel, Greetings From Asbury Park, begins with the death of a father, Joseph Larkin. His three children — Casey, David, and Gabrielle — all had different moms and different relationships with Joseph, none of which were positive. Joseph Larkin was distant, unkind, and spiteful, and his poor or absent parenting looms over the novel, as the children try to make sense of his death and their evolving relationships with one another and the world.
Turtel does a fantastic job of depicting a nuanced and fully realized Jersey Shore that doesn’t lean into the freewheeling raucousness (á la The Jersey Shore) typically associated with it. Turtel’s Jersey Shore, which stretches as far south as Belmar and as far north as Long Branch, doesn’t hide from the class and racial divides that cut through it: from the richer and whiter neighborhoods in Ocean Grove and Allenhurst, to an Asbury Park that, a few blocks off the boardwalk, is poorer and home to more people of color. These divisions are invited into the novel’s center, sparking tension and interesting conversations between characters.
Greetings From Asbury Park also masterfully addresses the limits that traditional masculine expectations can place on men, and how these limits negatively affect them and those around them. David, the son with whom Joseph spent the most time, experiences the greatest limitations, as he’d most absorbed his father’s lessons on masculinity (i.e., men shouldn’t be friends with women, valuing competition over all else, etc.). To hide from his grief and his aimless position in life — he inherited most of Joseph’s money, but has no job prospects or passions — he drinks and abuses drugs, gets into fist fights, and attempts to have as much casual sex as he can. These rushes temporarily leave him content, but they start to alienate him from his half-siblings and himself. Casey, too, has his own version of evasion: he hides from his feelings by withdrawing into himself and away from emotional conversations.
Although the novel is only 250 pages long, it manages to cycle through over half a dozen perspectives. This narrative approach offers a more rounded view of the story’s central characters, but at times it seems to dilute an already short novel; some chapters feel like lulls, in that they mine the actions and backstories of characters whom the broader narrative doesn’t seem as interested in.
And then there’s the prose, which is brooding and poetic and perfectly distant. It sets a bleak tone from beginning to end. Yet it can sometimes jump a few registers outside a character’s range, giving the impression that the author’s voice is overshadowing their own. These passages, though, are some of the book’s most beautiful and insightful — so perhaps the intrusions are worth it.
Benjamin Selesnick is a psychotherapist in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in Barely South Review, Lunch Ticket, Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other publications. He holds an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark.
