Now You See Him.

Gottlieb, Eli (author).

In his second novel, Gottlieb tells the story of childhood friends Rob Castor, a marginally successful writer who murders his girlfriend, and Nick Framingham, a middle-aged father and husband, living in upstate New York. The story follows Nick as he deciphers the last days of Rob’s life, relives the darker moments from his own past, and faces his rapidly disintegrating marriage and family life. Nick volleys between irrationality and an unknown source of guilt, becoming paranoid and distressed by his own normality, much like Jonathan Franzen’s Gary Lambert in The Corrections (2001)—complete with indifferent children and a wife bent on making him confront his own emotional deficiencies. Although the novel purports to solve the mystery of the downward turn of Nick’s writer friend Rob, its most intriguing moments come when Gottlieb investigates the life of Nick himself, revealing “a long-buried container of memory,” the volatile contents of which, once opened, “continue to spill without stopping.” Those “volatile contents” provide the novel’s thrills, but Gottlieb goes further, muddling the lines between family and friend, right and wrong, and love and obsession, proving that even the most droll character may covet a secret life.