Walking Toward Aurora
By Peter Levy

Walking Toward Aurora, the first novel by Peter Levy, is a debut that calls attention to itself from the beginning. Just looking at the cover, you think there's something there. The design is spare and masculine; it conveys a sense of something beneath the surface, something held back.

The first few chapters go quickly, with an impending sense of anticipation. You've never read anything quite like this before. You're telling all your friends about this book, about how it's the book you've always been looking for without even knowing it. Levy's style is self-assured but searching. He understands his characters implicitly, without grandstanding; there's an empathy between him and them that does not need to be spoken.

There is, however, a certain remoteness in Levy's prose that becomes apparent as you read further. No longer is he speaking directly to you, the reader. You begin to sense the incursion of a third party, a foreign presence, who threatens to compromise the bond between author and reader.

That's when you resolve to redouble your efforts, to keep reading no matter what the emotional cost. You're going to conquer this brilliant work and make it your own. There's something wrong with the way you were reading — you weren't bringing enough of your own wit and passion to the table. You know you can connect with Levy again.

So that's why it's such a shock when the book does end, abruptly, without resolving any of the issues it had brought up in the first few chapters. You look back to see if you'd made a mistake — maybe there really was more to it. But there wasn't.

It's only after you finish, then, that you realize that Levy had made a few minor missteps. Did he always have this annoying habit of starting sentences with "But" or "And"? Of constantly writing one-sentence — make that one-fragment — paragraphs in a misguided attempt at emphasis?

I mean, what a thinly constructed sham the whole thing was. His clipped sentences aren't economical; they're pure artifice, more so than the most flowery Victorian puffery. How could you have been taken in by this fourth-rate John Irving impersonator?

As for his characters, well, he has so much insight into them because THEY'RE ALL HIM! There's the Cool and Confident Peter Levy, the Soulful and Unsure Peter Levy, and the Wise and Pithy Peter Levy. The rest are ciphers; that's how he sees everyone who isn't Peter Levy.

And how could he call it Walking Toward Aurora? Who does he think he is with that pretentious title? Is he not aware that Aurora is a suburb, nay, an exurb, of Chicago? One does not walk toward it, one takes fucking Metra, and it still takes an hour and a half. Furthermore, I am so fucking sick of gerund titles. Everything has to be a progressive tense verb these days, at least in movie titles. That's it, he wants to make this into a movie. Starring Tom Cruise as Peter Levy in a Kenneth-Branagh-as-Woody-Allen-esque debacle of staggering proportions. No, I take that back. He'd want someone edgier. John Cusack, probably.

Walking Toward Aurora initially seems to be a phenomenal first novel. It's all the more unfortunate, then, that Levy is not the stylist, the storyteller, the passionate creator of characters, that he appears to be. It's a novel that tries so hard to be solidly grounded and emotionally mature, but ultimately proves to be inadequate, unsatisfying, and flaccid.

As a reader, you could do so much better.

Disclosure: The writer was dumped by the author.

— Lisa Simon