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    Among the Ten-Thousand Things
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    Among the Ten-Thousand Things
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    Among the Ten-Thousand Things
    Ebook292 pages4 hours

    Among the Ten-Thousand Things

    By Julia Pierpont

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Among the Ten-Thousand Things chronicles the breakup of a family in contemporary New York following a devastating extra-marital affair. Jack is a sculptor charming and vain, visionary and vulnerable in equal measure whose controversial work wins him attention from a young admirer. When Jack’s spurned lover sends his wife Deb a box of their correspondence to their apartment (and after it is accidentally intercepted by their children), Deb takes refuge with nine-year-old Kay and eleven-year-old Simon on Rhode Island where they become embroiled with a local family that hauntingly reflects their own.

    At once a mordant moral vision of modern family life and an ironic dissection of our self-deceptions, Julia Pierpont’s first novel is reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Dee’s blistering portraits of post 9/11 American family life. Brimming with lyricism and emotional intelligence, Among the Ten-Thousand Things is an astonishingly original and sure-footed debut that reflects our world back to us with extraordinary force.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOneworld Publications
    Release dateAug 17, 2015
    ISBN9781780747644
    Unavailable
    Among the Ten-Thousand Things

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    Reviews for Among the Ten-Thousand Things

    3/5

    188 ratings57 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Loved the authors metaphors and observations of what would otherwise be mundane details, however the narrative was disappointing to me.
    • 3/5
      If it were a movie, it would be one of those nuanced independent films that not everyone particularly likes. What I loved about Among the Ten Thousand Things was the writing, which I found to be unique, strong, brilliant, alive. Real.But I had high expectations for this, after all the hyped reviews on the back cover. I thought it would be funny. It apparently was meant to be, but I laughed only once, really, about 255 pages in. It is third person, but we get the perspective of each member of the family. Deb, Jack, and the kids, Simon and Kay. The characters were all well developed, the most real characters I ever met. They could be my neighbors. But it was eleven year old Kay who I really cared about. She was the one I rooted for, the one I wanted to reach out to. She was the best thing about the book. Jack I found to be a typical screw up, a lost man. Deb I fet sorry for. She seemed to want to do the right thing, but she seemed never to know what the right thing was. In the middle of the book is a fast forward into the future. We find out in short paragraphs what happens to everyone. I did not like this, had to put the book down a few days while I decided if I cared enough to even finish it. I finally picked it back up, because I missed Kay. It was worth it to finish, ending with a bittersweet moment between the kids. It felt right.
    • 3/5
      Full disclosure: I got a copy of this book as part of the Early Reviewer program.You know how sometimes you read a blurb on the back of the book and you think, "Okay, I'll probably really like this book if so-and-so has that to say about it," and then you read the book yourself and think, "I'm pretty sure the blurber (is that a word?) didn't actually read the same book I did." That feeling is exactly the one I had about this book. The top blurb is from Jonathan Safran Foer and it says, "This book is one of the funniest, and most emotionally honest, I've read in a long time." The WSJ review says "An acute observer of social comedy..."Well, I feel misled. I did not find the book the least bit funny. What's funny about adultery? What's funny about divorce? What's funny about damaging your kids? I didn't laugh, I didn't snicker, I didn't even archly raise an eyebrow when reading this book. That said, I did not hate it. It was an interesting read. I didn't connect with any of the characters. And I didn't really understand the structure. Inventive, I guess, but I just found it confusing. And I'm not normally bothered by unusual structure (Matthew Kneale's English Passengers is one of my favorite books ever). I just felt like it didn't work in this one. But it's a plausible story of how infidelity can damage everyone in its orbit. And I would probably agree with the "emotionally honest" part of the blurb. And, you know, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Oprah's magazine all gave it glowing reviews. So, maybe it's worth your time and you'll love it more than I did.
    • 4/5
      I read this a few months ago and unfortunately can't remember much about it. I remember I liked the different points of view, but there was a lot of dragging things out and then years flying by in a page or two. I suppose that's how life can feel, but it made things disjointed for me.
    • 3/5
      I didn't love this book but I enjoyed it and I appreciated the different voices and actual character differences the author was able to develop. It wasn't slow, but simultaneously nothing much happened, and there wasn't any real resolution to what did happen. Which, frankly, was pretty realistic. Every decision or moment of confusion was legitimately complex, feelings grey, actions grey. Every character wanted conflicting things. Everyone was a little alone, and a little tired. A little too much like real life, in the end.
    • 3/5
      This novel has an immediately gripping introductory scene: a man's spurned mistress (we never learn her name) has decided not to burn the evidence of her former lover's indiscretions: the notes, the emails, the printed-out late-night chats. Instead, she sends them to the wife.

      What results is less predictable than you might think. For starters, the wife isn't the one who actually opens the package.

      All of this is to say that I was pretty intrigued at the start, but the book overall gradually sloped downhill for me. I never did find anything out about the wife that made me root for her (or care much about her at all, to be honest) and while I dutifully feel some distaste for the husband, I think I was also supposed to sympathize with him a little bit, or at least find him pitiful -- and I guess I did, but more as a detached observation than an emotional response. I don't feel sorry for him, or for her, because I don't really feel anything.

      But this book gets three stars because the teenage characters are much more interesting. They handle the threat to their nuclear family in very different ways, and we get brief glimpses of the people they will become as adults.

      An easy read, but full of twilight (dark-ish, but not quite dark) subject matter. Could be a beach read but isn't breezy or uplifting, so if that's what you're after, look elsewhere.



      Disclosure: I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange for my unbiased review.
    • 3/5
      I liked the premise of the book: A philandering husband's mistress sends a box of evidence of the affair to the man's wife, only to have it intercepted by the man's children. It also contains many very well drawn scenes. Much of the writing in this book could have been part of a very good book. However, very little happens and the characters are often so unlikeable. I wanted to get into the story of the children, and I started to during the climactic scenes, but they were never connected enough to the main plot or given enough room to develop on their own to work more independently. I also liked parts two and four, but they felt airlifted in from a more interesting, more formally experimental book. I might have liked that book, or the coming of age book about one or both of the sibling children, but this was not one that I'd recommend.
    • 4/5
      I won this book in August, but did not receive it until December. I am not sure if I amped myself up about this book with all the anticipation, or maybe the fact that there are so many great reviews may have contributed in my desire to read. Unfortunately, this book did not live up to all the hype for me. It was a good book, but it did not live up to my expectations.
    • 4/5
      Well written. Not for the prim and proper.
    • 3/5
      It's a well written story about the damage keeping secrets can do to an already dysfunctional family. The characters were unsympathetic except for Kay. Probably would not recommend it.
    • 1/5
      I did not enjoy "Among the Ten Thousand Things" at all. It was not at all engaging, and I couldn't warm up to any of the characters. I read the whole thing, hoping it would resolve in some satisfying way; it didn't. I gave it to my daughter, with reservation, because sometimes she likes things that I don't, but her reaction was the same. Just dull.
    • 2/5
      If you have ever been around a couple that is fighting, that uncomfortable feeling you have is pretty much what reading the first half of this book is like. I did not enjoy it, and could not finish it.
    • 4/5
      Overall, I enjoyed this book. The story is about the disintegration of a family. The parents are Jack Shanley, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a successful NYC artist, his wife Deborah, a former member of the corps at the City Ballet, and their two children, fifteen year old Simon and eleven year old Kay. We learn early on that Deborah is Jack's second, much younger wife. They became sexually involved when Jack was married to someone else and married when Deborah became pregnant with Simon. What works well: Pierpont is adept at telling the story from the perspective of the different family members. What doesn't work: I didn't like being told the ultimate outcome of the "will we stay together/will we divorce" dynamic midway through the book. I know this was intentional, but, personally, I felt like I should just quit reading at that point. The secondary characters--Izzy, a contemporary of Deborah's at City ballet who has become a star; Gary, Jack's RISD roommate who shares a summer place with Deborah and the kids and who seems to want to become more than her estranged husband's best friend to Deborah; and Teegan, the small town girl with whom Simon becomes involved--all come across as cardboard cut-outs. Jack's trip to see his mother and stepfather also just didn't work. Presumably, it is supposed to explain how Jack became the flawed person he is. The problem is that, while I may be stereotyping, adult children of alcoholics tend to have a certain type of personality and Jack's personality is the antithesis of that personality. Finally, while we learn that Deborah moved on with Eli we are never told how she manages this. I guess though the fundamental problem for me is that Deborah is a pretty unsympathetic character. It's hard to feel all that sympathetic towards a woman who keeps proclaiming that Jack's behavior is against the "rules," given how their relationship originated. Moreover, there is a strong implication that getting pregnant by Jack was Deborah's way of getting out of the ballet world when she realized she was never going further than the corps. So, overall, it was an impressive debut, but at times it read more like a screen play than a novel. The kids were much more sympathetic than the parents. I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program.
    • 4/5
      I personally found this novel better than the ratings seem to reflect but not very unique or memorable. Sad and occasionally moving, yes. Writer Julia Pierpont did a good job of characterizing each family member, especially since she's in her 20's (both older than the children and younger than the parents in this story). There are some emotionally stirring moments when Pierpont writes from the point of view of 11-year-old Kay. And there were some painful, honest descriptions of the troubled marriage of the mother and father. The struggles of the teen-aged son seemed pretty standard for a contemporary novel. Overall, it has some interest for readers of New York stories but would I re-read it in the future? No, I would not. I hope that Pierpont aims higher and braver in her next book - she has the talent.
    • 3/5
      Looked forward to reading this book because it had early good buzz, but I found it disappointing. I found the writing -- in which the author has insight into all the characters -- to be off-putting; I guess I like a novel narrated by one voice. The story itself is about a married couple who deal with the discovery of the husband's affair irony, I suppose, since it is later learned that the couple got together when they had an affair that resulted in her pregnancy. The story drags, except for a weird part in which the author speeds forward and tells the future of all the characters, only to return to real time in the next part of the book. There is potential here and it is only the debut novel, but I found it a struggle to finish.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of a family struggling through the aftermath of the husband having an affair and a subsequent divorce. The story moves slowly, but I found the storyline of the children interesting. The wife is hard to like or admire. An ok story with a ho hum ending.
    • 1/5
      Not for me - I had to stop around the 100 page mark. Maybe I've simply read to many books with a similar premise (cosmopolitan young New Yorkers grappling with entering adulthood), but the premise felt tired and the characters weren't compelling to me.
    • 2/5
      I received a free copy of Julia Pierpont's "Among the Ten Thousand Things" from LT's Early Reviewers program. Unfortunately, I didn't particularly enjoy the book.The novel tells the story of a family that is crumbling from the results of an affair, which was discovered by the family's children after their father's mistress mails a box of his emails to their home. It really wasn't a fresh or interesting story.I felt the novel really lacked an emotional core -- of the characters were going through the motions, but they felt too cardboard to actually feel anything. Every character. I also had problems with the writing, which tried to be clever... I absolutely despised the confusing way new characters were introduced. This novel really wasn't a good fit for me, it seems.
    • 1/5
      Pointless, longwinded story about a father's infidelity being revealed to his kids, his wife's reaction and all the changes in their lives afterward.
    • 2/5
      Just couldn't do it. Reduced to skimming. The premise seemed alright, but the actual characters didn't grab me.
    • 3/5
      Have to say I disliked this book. I very much disliked Jack, the husband/father who was having an affair,, and never really got into the heads of the other characters. So much of it was written from the kids' point of view that it almost seemed like a YA book, but not as interesting. Plus the author has irritating stylistic tics, like over-hyphenating..
    • 3/5
      An honest look at a failing marriage. I enjoyed the kids more than the adults in this novel. A good read, but not a standout.
    • 3/5
      I looked forward to reading this book with anticipation because of all the pre-release hype about it. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood for a book about a marriage falling apart because of the husband’s infidelities. Yes, it was interesting reading about the interactions between family members including the kids, and to see what a dysfunctional family he had grown up in, but I did not find it compelling reading.
    • 3/5
      Uneven in places but I did finish - that's something these days. I didn't love this but would give Pierpont another look. Maybe her sophomore novel will be a bit better.
    • 4/5
      Julia Pierpont’s debut novel opens with a package sent to Deb Shanley from the woman who is having an affair with Deb’s husband, Jack. But instead of Deb, the box is opened by her child, 11-year-old Kate. Filled with hundreds of printed emails chronicling the affair, the box sets in motion the destruction of a family. Tense, occasionally funny, and starring the fictional world’s biggest narcissist (Jack), Peirpont’s novel is mostly successful if not a bit uneven.
    • 4/5
      This book is hard for me to review. I liked what the author was doing with it most of the time, but sometimes, it confused me. She uses a stylized and creative format to tell a story that some people obviously didn't enjoy. I thought her style worked for this particular piece and even created mini-cliff hangers that drew out the drama, but perhaps it just made sense to my distractable brain.The biggest problem I had with this book was the ending. The author draws out the story line until the final few pages then succinctly in the epilogue reveals an overview many years in advance when the children were mature adults. I couldn't decide if I was happy to know the future or disappointed at the almost post-script lives of the people that I had grown to know. It did seem to diminish the story some, but I would probably have equally disliked not knowing at least the results of several of the story's threads. I wonder if anyone else felt the same? I'll have to read some more of the reviews.I enjoyed the vast majority of this story, and I think that there is an audience for this book, I'm just not sure who I would actually recommend it to. It gives a good perspective of the effect of marital infidelity and separation on children's lives within this particular family. It uses a dramatic and creative style to draw the reader in, but may be off putting to certain readers. However, I think it was the intimate look at so many random moments in the lives of the characters that most appealed to me. Each of them had good and bad traits that made them seem real and believable. I think it was that intimacy that kept me attracted to the story and will either draw or detach a reader's interest.I thank the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.
    • 3/5
      This was a book I read because of the positive reviews. It was a well written first novel and I would probably give Pierpont another shot with her next book. This book was okay and it did do a good job dealing with infidelity and its consequences. It created an interesting event in the beginning of the book that moved the action forward. I did find the style and the use of alternating times interesting but it might not work for everyone. Not a very long book so if you read it and it doesn't work, it won't be a big investment. I do find that the hype over the book was not justified.
    • 3/5
      There were things in this book that did not make sense for me. The spurned lover sends an anonymous box of all written remnants of her affair with Mrs. Shanley's husband. The box is intercepted, opened and read through by one of the family's children. We later find out that the mystery lover had left her apartment and maybe the town after sending the box. Okay, so why did she unload the contents of her affair to the wife? I think that went unexplained. The kids in this family were the interesting treasures. The wife and husband, not so interesting. Each sibling is tested and tempted with youthful treats and indiscretions, some with hilarious results. It is a humorous and quick read for a lazy summer day. My thanks to Penguin's First to Read program and the author for a complimentary copy.
    • 2/5
      Among the ten thousand things, Julia Pierpont, author, Hillary Huber, narratorWhen the book began, I was stunned by the extent of filthy language and graphic sexual descriptions used. I almost stopped listening, but instead, I decided to look up some of the reviews to see if there was a warning about language or if the book had been received well, so far. There were no warnings, and the reviews seemed to indicate that the book was a worthwhile read, so I soldiered on. Perhaps without the crude language, I would have been able to appreciate the book more, but in the end, I still believe the trashy vocabulary diminished the literary quality of the novel and was way of the top.The story is about the Shanleys, a family that was coming apart at the seams because of a husband’s serial infidelity. When Jack’s spurned lover sent a box of erotic emails to his home, with his wife Deb’s name scrawled across the top, the emails, unfortunately, fell into the hands of 11-year old Kay and 15-year old Simon before she got to it. Utter chaos developed. Deb was totally surprised and shocked by the content, and Jack tried, unsuccessfully, to explain the whole mess away without the appropriate seriousness. Now that the children were aware of his behavior, which was previously known to his wife, the situation was far worse than it was when his “sin” was originally uncovered.As the marriage began to disintegrate, the author explored the thoughts and responses of each of them. Deb Shanley, 41-years old, was completely thrown and wanted to run away. Jack Shanley, 55-years old was totally off balance and couldn’t believe the way his life was falling apart. He begged Deb to forgive him, but she was no longer in a forgiving mood. Kay was too young to understand what the emails meant, but she knew enough to know that they did not have a good message. She was sad and confused. Simon understood too well; he was angry and became disrespectful. I was left with this thought, what kind of a person would send a box of smut to a home, knowing full well that it might get into the hands of children? I don’t believe the question was thoroughly examined; it felt glossed over.The main part of the story takes place over a few days, after which the author summarizes the rest of their lives, very quickly, and when it ends, the New York condo is being sold, Jack is no longer in the picture, and the children are independent. The book was a disappointment. It was difficult to take it too seriously because of the crude language. I think the story would have been more interesting and less distracting, if the author had simply concentrated on showing how infidelity and a lack of judgment could cause the dissolution of a marriage and harm the children irrevocably. The characters, rather than the dirty sex talk, should have been better developed. The betrayal affected all of them with devastating consequences.I found Deb’s holier than thou reaction a bit disingenuous. When she had dated Jack, he had been married. She broke up his marriage. Why then would she expect a man who had already been disloyal once, to remain loyal to her? Her rush to judgment and her complete disappointment in him seemed extreme since not only did she steal another woman’s husband, but she became pregnant, and that pregnancy worked as a further inducement for him to leave his wife. She behaved as if she was the only injured party and pretty much ignored the needs of the children. On the spur of the moment, leaving Jack behind, she decided to go to their country cabin, a place that had been unoccupied for some time. They owned it with Jack’s friend Gary, and he came up and stayed with them. Why was that appropriate to her? Meanwhile, Jack could not believe that she had left. He didn’t seem to really understand the gravity of the situation.I thought it was incongruous for a woman who stole another woman’s husband to be shocked when someone steals hers. Both Deb and Jack defied the rules and didn’t think there would be consequences. Deb was headstrong and exhibited the same kind of poor judgment as Jack did. She tended to act without thinking first. They were both self serving, immature and irresponsible. I did not feel that the conclusion was well drawn. It left a lot of unanswered questions about more than a decade of intervening years. Deb’s relationship with Eli was sloughed over; Jack’s illness was not explained well, Simon’s future seemed up in the air and I was not sure what Kay was going to do with the rest of her life. It felt like the incident tore the family asunder and they could not be put back together again, ever. The book seemed to imply that a mistake could, irreversibly, take on a life of its own.The crude use of terms to describe the husband’s emails with his lover, were over the top. Perhaps in print form, it would not so objectionable because you can simply turn the page, but in an audio, you are assaulted, forced to listen to it, without any warning. I was left wondering why so many authors were lately finding it necessary to include lurid details of sex which neither enhance nor enrich their novels. There are many novels out there that hint at the same behavior without assailing the reader with it. At the end of the book I began to wonder if novels would not soon need a rating system in the same way that movies do.The narrator read clearly but the voices of both of the male main characters and both of the female main characters seemed to be the same, regardless of the age of the character, so it became hard to differentiate between Kay and Deb and Jack and Simon. I was never sure which one was speaking. In addition, as the thoughts of each character were bared, it sometimes felt as if the story was jumping all over the place without an appropriate segueway. If you must read it, I strongly recommend the printed version of the book, so you can skip pages.
    • 4/5
      What begins as a somewhat ordinary, if convincingly drawn, portrait of an explosion within a family unit becomes so much more thanks to a Woolfian twist in the middle of the telling. Suddenly, despite or even perhaps because of the family's futures being known, we are drawn all the more closely to them over the course of 18 days in the summer. They are still a pretty ordinary group of people - nothing makes any of them any different from the many people who go through similar things throughout their lives - but Pierpont presents them so beautifully that the back half of the novel earns the raves she's been receiving. Hers is a talent to keep an eye on.

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