Fiction January 1, 1

Maybe all small towns have it: the myth of the golden boy (or girl), the one with irresistible flair and hard-nosed ambition, the kid everyone knows will go on to succeed—or, at the very least, manage to move out of the county. For the little town of Monarch, New York, the setting of Eli Gottlieb’s second novel, that favored youth was blue-eyed Rob Castor, eldest son of a handsome hardware-store owner and a woman who’d dreamed of becoming an actress. Rob was hip, ironic, charismatic: As his best friend, Nick Framingham, puts it, there was “something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply