BROKEN MIRRORS AND BURNING BUSHES

A young, reckless couple in Southern California deals with increasingly disastrous situations in Rubinstein’s debut novel.

Drug dealer and aspiring rap-rocker Paul Koval has been in love with his wife, Alice, since he first met her in his community college chemistry class: “The way she seemed to look right through me into my soul. It was that familiar, Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere type feeling. It was the fact that her IQ was probably off the charts. She’s off the chain on every way.” Theirs is a relationship meant for adventure—although when it finds them, it’s not always fun. Both come from traumatic childhoods, and their adult lives are a combustive mix of love, drugs, and violence. They dislike their dead-end service jobs, so Alice encourages Paul to expand his drug business to include meth. She gives birth to their first daughter, Hannah, while Paul is in surgery after being shot by robbers dressed as the Three Stooges on Halloween. Later, after a shootout in the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble, the couple decide that they “need to get out of California for a while,” so they set off on a drug-fueled cross-country restaurant-robbing crime spree. Rubinstein’s prose is frenetic and gritty, capturing the increasing pressure under which Paul finds himself: “I shook my head, trying to clear it. Come on, what are you gonna do? You say it’ll work out, right? How? Go get a job? Where? And looking the way you do? With your work history?…Your daughter’s hungry now.” However, the book is far too long—in part because it spends too much time laying out a comprehensive history of the couple’s relationship. Even so, Rubinstein manages to create characters whom readers can truly feel for, despite their poor decision-making skills and generally grungy ethos. Paul inevitably compares himself and Alice to infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and it’s a comparison that’s not too far off the mark. Buried within this methed-out epic is a very old story about vicious cycles—and the young Americans who lack the resources to find their way out of them.

A dirty, chatty, and sometimes-brutal love story for the rap-rock set.