The Two Lives of Robert Littman
In January 1974, a seventeen-year-old boy in Central New York makes a choice. He fails his algebra final by two points. His teacher offers him a make-up. He says no. He leaves for Florida with a girl named Maria and a borrowed Karmann Ghia, and his life splits in two.
The Two Lives of Robert Littman tells both halves at once, in alternating chapters. In one life, he stays away. He comes back. He marries Chris, a young widow who chose him the day he walked into a Red Lobster looking for work. He raises two sons in a trailer park outside Liverpool, then in a falling-down house in Lakeport, then in a raised ranch on Torchwood Lane. He drinks for fifteen years, runs with bikers, sells coke on the side, and beats his son with a belt in a moment he will carry for the rest of his life. He quits drinking in 1991 in the foyer of his own house, and spends thirty years learning the slow shape of love through dogs, work, and the wife who has been carrying him without complaint since before he knew he was being carried.
In the other life, he stays in New York. He retakes the algebra final. He takes a Pell grant to SUNY Oswego, climbs through Harvard Law, clerks for Justice Thurgood Marshall, marries no one, builds a federal judicial career across three decades, and arrives at sixty-four alone in a Manhattan apartment with a Supreme Court nomination collapsing around him, brought down by a woman he was warned about and didn't heed.
Two lives, alternating chapter by chapter. Two ways the same man tried to become someone. One that asked him to grow up and stay. One that let him stay sharp and small.
Written in the spare, restrained prose of literary autofiction, set against the working-class landscape of Central New York and the elite corridors of Cambridge and Washington, The Two Lives of Robert Littman is a novel about choice and consequence - about the road not taken, the road that was, and the woman who, in one life, made the difference.
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