Suicide and soul-searching

The premise behind Eli Gottlieb’s novel “Now You See Him” has a familiar ring: talented young scribe finds literary success in the big city, leaving his old pals behind until his fateful homecoming.

Variations on that theme abound, from the classic Thomas Wolfe novel “You Can’t Go Home Again” to the mundane TV series “October Road.” Yet when Gottlieb uses the outline to tell the story of an on-the-verge writer and the effect of his return on his best friend and other satellite characters, he combines those elements into a work of literary suspense that brings unexpected surprises.

The writer, Rob Castor, became “a minor cult celebrity in his mid-twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid sleepy upstate New York town,” not unlike Monarch, N.Y., where he was born and raised. But we soon learn that a dozen years later, the literary supernova has fallen, consumed by his obsessive love for estranged girlfriend Kate Pierce, a writer on the cusp of her own success whom Rob murders in her apartment in New York City before returning home and taking his own life.

Or so we’re told. Chief witness and narrator to Rob’s dark deeds is Nick Framingham, a middle-aged Monarch man with a wife, two kids and a steady job. Although their lives took dramatically different paths, he adores Rob, the best friend who grew up across the street from the Framinghams, and Nick freely confesses that with “the slavish adoration of a child, I’d tried briefly to be him.” At first, Nick entertains with his wry observations of the media madness that infects the stolid citizens of Monarch, who have leveraged the tragedy of Rob Castor’s decline and death into their 15 minutes of fame.

There’s Major Wilkinson, a stalwart World War II veteran, who suddenly buys a new wardrobe and poses for the cameras in front of the local Krispy Kreme “like a Wal-Mart greeter gone mad,” and Mac Sterling, a New York City-based celebrity magazine writer who spins his childhood relationship with the dead man into a contract for the definitive Rob Castor biography. Gradually the barroom reveries about Rob’s prowess with women or the surprising role Kate’s new lover, billionaire David Framkin, plays in sealing her fate, give way to an exploration of Nick and the secrets that lie just below the surface of his and Rob’s lives.

If Rob was the flashy playboy, Nick is his polar opposite, seemingly placid but adrift in a sexless marriage to wife Lucy, both of them consumed by the duties of parenthood. Nick’s prolonged bereavement over Rob’s death pushes Lucy to demand that he get therapy, which drags him into a morass of feelings he is ill-equipped to understand -- feelings about Rob, his wife and the reasons behind his distant relationship with his father. Nick’s confusion is inextricably linked to Rob and the Castor family, the reader’s understanding of which deepens as we learn of Nick’s sexual relationship with Rob’s sister Belinda and his near-seduction as a youth by Rob’s mother, Shirley.

The compelling story of the secrets behind Nick’s bond with the Castors and his own parents, his conflicting emotions about the deeds and death of Rob as well as his future with Lucy and their sons is told with a remarkable sensitivity to the nuance of personality and intimate relationships and makes “Now You See Him” a hypnotic read. Whether Gottlieb is tracing the sad inevitability of Nick’s deflecting arguments with Lucy or the awkward encounters he has with his sons as he realizes that their bond with their mother has the pull of a planetary system while he moves “in and out of that universe, a dependable satellite returning home each night,” he makes each scene so deeply felt that when a pair of major secrets are revealed near the novel’s end, their truth reverberates in our bones.

With such mastery of characters, pacing and plot, it may come as a surprise that “Now You See Him” is only Gottlieb’s second novel.

“The Boy Who Went Away,” his much-lauded 1997 coming-of-age novel, was about a family struggling with an autistic son, and one can see the themes of family secrets and suffering are at play in this sophomore effort as well. Yet “Now You See Him” stands on its own as a triumph, its title suggesting as much about its author’s permanence on the literary scene as it does about the characters whose lives he so expertly illuminates.

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Paula L. Woods is the author of the Charlotte Justice mystery series and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.