MY PATH TO GREATNESS

A half-Armenian boy finds his place in midcentury Manhattan in Sahatdjian’s literary novel.

Johan Manootdjian is a true product of New York: He lives with his Armenian father and Swedish mother in an apartment building the family owns overlooking Broadway. The other apartments are filled with tenants from across the world (as well as various relatives), and the streets of Manhattan serve as Johan’s playground, a place to explore and encounter the vast swath of humanity with whom he shares his city. His haunted, inaccessible father, an immigrant from a country “where the dead live,” works as an “expert cashier” in downtown restaurants and shuns other Armenians. His mother, a devout Christian, warns her son against iniquity and promises the impending return of Jesus “like a thief in the night.” His five siblings run the gamut, from the accomplished (Rachel, who goes to college outside of Manhattan), to the rebellious (Luke, who must be beaten into submission), to the disappointing (Naomi, who marries an alcoholic military veteran named Chuck—a name, Johan notes, “that requires big teeth”). His elementary school is a confusing place where the other boys challenge Johan—who is often mocked for his strange name and oddly shaped head—to live up to their disruptive expectations. When Johan is expelled for acting out, he is sent to the private Claremont School, where he gets a second chance to become the studious, well-behaved son his mother desperately wants. Then he meets Jane Thayer, a girl for whom he immediately falls head-over-heels. (“I want to marry you someday,” he tells her after their first kiss.) Johan has always been confused as to which master he wishes to please, but will he be forced to choose between greatness—whatever that means for a sensitive, unathletic boy like him—and Jane?

Sahatdjian, in his everyday observations of Johan’s life, imbues the world of 1950s and ’60s Manhattan with a tinge of the surreal. Johan and Jane’s make-out sessions at Dead Man’s Hill are frequently interrupted by voyeurs hiding in the grass: “They did not go without notice. Spies. Love spies. They knelt in the tall grass and were heard moving in the brush before they were seen. When Johan looked up, they would duck…They were men claimed by their loneliness, men who, wherever they went, they went alone.” The nearly 450 pages cover Johan’s life up through the end of high school, but the text features very little in the way of dramatic incident. When such incidents do occur—like when the middle-school-aged Johan allows an older male security guard on Columbia’s campus to have sex with him—the author sprints past them with little comment. The novel calls to mind the expansive biographical projects of Proust or Knausgaard, and Sahatdjian is a shrewd enough observer of the world to keep readers invested in the minutia of Johan’s midcentury boyhood. So long as those readers do not expect fireworks, they will find much to appreciate here.

A keen-eyed coming-of-age novel with a vintage feel.