The Apartment on Calle Uruguay

November 15, 2021
The contemplative latest from Lazar (Vengeance) follows a grief- and guilt-stricken artist through a series of changes in the early days of the Trump administration. After Christopher Bell’s girlfriend, Malika, dies in a car accident, he steps away from painting, buys a house on Long Island, maintains his sobriety, and begins teaching at a local college. He also falls for Ana Ramirez, a journalist who escaped the violence in her home country of Venezuela, and their relationship brings back memories of Malika, whom he imagines to be judging him. Christopher, who was born in Israel, shares with Ana a sense of displacement. He keeps in contact with Malika’s incarcerated brother, Jesse, and tells him about Ana, but when Ana moves from Long Island to Mexico, where her family resettled after fleeing Venezuela, the couple’s romance sputters. Christopher’s narrative tics, such as an aversion to certain specific details like the names of song titles (“the song about being halfway there, living on a prayer”), can feel cloying, but the account of his and Ana’s struggles to maintain their relationship through adversity and upheaval are fascinating. In the end, Lazar perfectly orchestrates a symphony of frustration, empathy, fear, and hope into a thoughtful and timely tale.

Starred review from January 1, 2022
"Imagine watching the raw footage of your life."" So begins Lazar's (Vengeance, 2018) latest novel, a stream of consciousness tour de force. His protagonist, artist Christopher Bell, narrates the footage of his life during the Trump years, bookended by the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and the El Paso mass shooting. After the wrenching death of his partner, Malika, Bell has taken refuge in his home in the woods of rural New York, where he unexpectedly comes up against other people: neighbors with their troublesome dysfunctions and Ana, a new love. His journey back to love, life, and art ultimately leads him to the eponymous apartment in Mexico City. Bell's thoughts and feelings are visceral, even sensual, and intellectually rigorous. He works through the at-times long distance relationship with Ana, a Venezuelan expat, conserves his relationship with Jesse, Malika's incarcerated brother, and navigates "the endless cycle of violence and amnesia that [is] America's actual history," as Malika states it, which finds him exacting justice in unexpected ways. Lazar's stirring, multilayered, and beautifully written novel will strike a chord with all readers.

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Starred review from December 15, 2021
Haunted by the death of his girlfriend, an Israeli-born painter of mixed racial origins struggles with displacement, the complications of a new relationship, and life under Donald Trump. The painter, who goes by the name Christopher Bell, blames himself for the death of his girlfriend Malika Jordan, a politically provocative artist, who got into a fatal car accident after he let her drive off in a rainstorm following an argument. So he brings a ton of emotional baggage to his romance with Ana Ramirez, an exiled Venezuelan journalist. Following tragedies of her own, she is reinventing herself as a podcaster specializing in "the precariousness of 'home.' " She and Chris share a strong sexual attraction, beleaguered outsider status, and simmering anger over Charlottesville and atrocities perpetuated under the new administration. But, frustrated with Chris' remoteness, Ana moves to Mexico City, where her family has fled from Caracas. Chris, who has abandoned his art, is left alone in his house by the woods in Eastern Long Island to contemplate what to do with his life: "I didn't believe there was such a thing as meaning, but I knew the active pursuit of it was sanity." Ultimately, he and Ana slowly put the pieces of their relationship back together, but with "genocides and fires and thousand-year floods already here," there will be no escaping the harsh realities in store. For all that, Lazar's latest novel, following Vengeance (2018), is anything but a downer. His brand of introspection is page-turning, informed by his hip sensibility, musical way with language, and sensuality. As deep a dive as Lazar takes into one man's alienation--from himself as well as the world around him--the book soars with timely truth. An engrossing statement of where we are, told through the eyes of a reluctant survivor.

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