When we meet Owen Lerner and his family, we learn a great deal simply from observing Owen, a pediatric psychopharmacologist, reaching into his pocket for a quarter to put in a parking meter. As he moves to slip the coin in, Owen reflects on his marriage, his children, his work. Life is good even if peppered with small anxieties. But then Owen feeds the meter and everything changes in one elongated electrified moment: he is literally struck by lightning and hurled to the pavement. In one of the novel's most elegantly crafted passages (among many equally lovely passages), Owen's body hovers near death as his life unreels--all of life's mysteries revealed in a flash of ecstatic enlightenment and accompanied, improbably, by the smell of the world's best barbecue.
Though badly burned, Owen survives his injuries, but his recovery is slow and hampered by his desire to revisit that fleeting moment of ecstasy, which leads him to act erratically--all he wants to do is barbecue. In the months following the accident, the entire Lerner family undergoes a sometimes humorous but often very painful transformation as roles are redefined and notions of reality are challenged and recalibrated.
The subtlety and intimacy with which Zuravleff portrays the Lerners would be enough to make Man Alive! a compelling novel but her understanding of and ability to convey the slippery nature of reality and by extension, what is "normal," lifts it to another level. This is a wonderful and in many ways magical novel by an exceptional author. --Debra Ginsberg, author