Synopses & Reviews
Ever since he was an aspiring teen magician, thirty-eight-year-old Paul Brickner has been obsessed with the enigmatic Sung Soo. Also known as the "Wondrous Chinese Wizard," Sung Soo was a famous illusionist and con artist who taught Houdini ("that pre-Freudian mama's boy") many of his famous illusions. Paul has long since abandoned his magician aspirations but not his Sung Soo Project, which has taken many different forms over the years: thesis, screenplay, play, rock opera, novel, and now a popular history/quasi-scholarly investigation into the life of the man whose final vanishing act in 1919 mystifies the public to this day.
Paul has been performing his own personal vanishing act for much of his adult life, trying to escape his own anxieties, responsibilities, fears, commitments, and most of all, the guilt he feels about the tragic ending of his second marriage. But things have been a little different since he met Nadia, nearly twenty years his junior and a gentle and lovely foil to Paul's profound negativity. Shortly after arriving on Cape Cod for vacation, Paul and Nadia are joined by two old friends and one troubled ex-boyfriend. When a hurricane makes landfall and knocks out the electricity, everyone drinks a little too much, and things start getting very, very strange. There are strange couplings, strange encounters, and strange insights all of which somehow serve to bring Paul and Nadia closer together.
Funny, moving, and compellingly supernatural, Beautiful Somewhere Else explores the fear of intimacy, the belief that things are better anywhere but here and, ultimately, the sublime of the here and now.
Review
"In his first novel, Policoff shows a flair for pithy characterizations that serve to limn the zeitgeist....[He] displays vivid descriptive skills and a low-key, subtle sense of humor." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
Review
"Beautiful Somewhere Else is enormously fun....and an ardent, tonic embrace of otherwordly beauty." Susan Choi, author of Pulitzer-prize finalist American Woman