The Gargoyle Hunters
A novel
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Both his family and his city are crumbling when thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts stumbles headlong into his estranged father’s illicit architectural salvage business in 1970s Manhattan. Griffin clambers up the façades of tenements and skyscrapers to steal their nineteenth-century architectural sculptures—gargoyles and sea monsters, goddesses and kings. As his father sees it, these evocative creatures, crafted by immigrant artisans, are an endangered species in an age of sweeping urban renewal.
Desperate for money to help his artist mother keep their home, and yearning to connect with his father, Griffin fails to see that his father’s deepening obsession with preserving the treasures of Gilded Age New York endangers them all.
As he struggles to hold his family together and build a first love with his girlfriend on a sturdier foundation than his parents’ marriage, Griffin must learn to develop himself into the man he wants to become, and discern which parts of his life may be salvaged—and which parts must be let go.
Hilarious and poignant, this critically acclaimed debut is both a vivid love letter to a vanishing city and an intimate portrait of father and son. And it solves the mystery of a stunningly brazen architectural heist—the theft of an entire landmark building—that made the front page of The New York Times in 1974. With writing both tender and powerful, The Gargoyle Hunters brings a remarkable new voice to the canon of New York fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
