The Gargoyle Hunters

January 16, 2017
Gill, who has written extensively about New York City’s architectural gems, makes his fiction debut with a coming-of-age tale about preservation and its discontents. The result is flawed but intriguing, a structure whose outward charm conceals some hidden cracks. In the late 1970s, the young narrator, Griffin, lives in an Upper East Side row house with his sister, bohemian mother, and the steady stream of down-on-their-heels boarders she takes in. Living downtown, his mercurial father restores antique architectural decorations, often pilfered from one of the many buildings slated to be torn down by “brutally efficient” demolition contractors as the city continues to “cannibaliz itself.” Dad enlists the nimble, eager-to-please Griffin in his thieving efforts, which involve prying gargoyles perched on Manhattan’s historic buildings, then a more ambitious effort: to “steal a building.” The portrait of Griffin’s father has some nice touches—he is the kind of man who takes his baby out for a midnight walk and returns with a terra-cotta bust strapped onto the carriage—but he comes across less as a rounded character than an eccentric tour guide holding forth on ornamental features, lambasting philistine developers, or speechifying: “The lives lived by generations of New Yorkers in and around a historic building give it all kinds of layers of collective meaning—a patina of memory and grime and experience.” Griffin himself is a winning narrator striving to map his place within urban and familial landscapes in a bewildering state of flux.

January 1, 2017
A teenager gets wise to Manhattan, and his father, via the city's architectural ornaments.Griffin, the narrator of Gill's debut novel, recalls the year he was 13 years old and navigating the ruins of his parents' broken marriage. His mother is taking in boarders at their home on 89th Street between Third and Lex to make ends meet, while his father works in antiques restoration. When dad notices Griffin's ability to squeeze into small spaces, he's recruited into the dark side of the family business, sneaking into the city's historic buildings and chipping and sawing off gargoyles and other decorations from facades. The book is set during 1974 and 1975, with the crime-ridden city at the brink of bankruptcy, so the pair's lawlessness feels like part of the landscape, though Dad insists he's "liberating" civic treasures from the inevitable wrecking ball. (The novel's poignant prologue is set in the New Jersey dumping grounds of the ruins of old Penn Station.) Gill, who's written often on New York's architectural history, understands buildings from wrought-iron panels to terra cotta sculptures, which makes for some detailed and engaging set pieces, like the pair's death-defying, dark-of-night effort to remove a gargoyle from the top of the Woolworth Building or Griffin's exploring the innards of the Statue of Liberty with a romantic interest. But as Griffin looks back on his youth from the present day, his (and Gill's) nostalgia feels awkwardly stronger for buildings than for loved ones. Dad is purposefully Sphinx-like, but Griffin's mother, sister, and friends rarely feel like more than incidental figures relative to the novel's true passion. Even so, the story enlivens in the closing chapters, which set the depths of Dad's obsession against the arrival of a hurricane, suggesting that our best efforts to save our civic treasures will always have to reckon with nature taking its course. A portrait of 1970s New York that's sturdy if sometimes stiff.

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Starred review from January 1, 2017
Thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is tasked by his mother to destroy a long-abandoned outhouse, out of which a large gnarled tree has been growing in the fertile soil behind their five-story brownstone. This metaphor sets the tone for Gill's stellar debut, in which the Caulfieldesque hero must navigate both the crumbling marriage of his eccentric parents and the impending disaster that is 1974 New York City. While his conceptual-artist mother creates mosaics out of egg shells, Griffin and his sister, Quigley, battle an eccentric cast of boarders for the meager provisions in the pantry. Craving the attention of his estranged father, Griffin sneaks into his dad's warehouse and is quickly brought into the family business of architectural salvaging. The lithe and sprightly Griffin is the ideal partner to help steal architectural sculptures, including gargoyles, off the faces of buildings. Gill, who is a noted expert on historical architecture, brings a DeLillo-like eye for detail to his descriptions of the city while also perfectly capturing the father-son relationship in all its warmth, hero-worship, and, ultimately, disappointment. A bildungsroman rich with symbolism, wistful memory, and unabashed longing, this is a remarkably tender love letter to a city and imaginative fiction par excellence. For fans of Donna Tartt and Colum McCann.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from December 1, 2017

New York City changed rapidly in the 1970s as buildings were demolished to make space for new ones. In the midst of this transformation, 13-year-old Griffin is having troubles at school and at home, and he misses his father after his parents split up. He begins visiting his father's workplace, where he sees decorative items that his father and his crew have rescued from demolition sites: gargoyles, busts, and flowers to be sold to collectors. Soon agile Griffin begins braving dangerous heights as he helps his dad. (His mother and older sister do not worry about where he is after school, although he frets about them.) His father's appreciation of beautiful detail leads him to liberate a few gargoyles that are not slated for destruction. Gills has a knack for describing buildings, and New Yorkers will find themselves looking out for the decorative features he mentions. VERDICT This appealing, exciting work is ideal for fans of coming-of-age stories.-Karlan Sick, formerly at New York Public Library

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