Second Hand: A Novel

"In the junk business, we collect the ugly with the beautiful, the bizarre with the elegant, the valuable with the worthless, sometimes forgetting which is which, or intentionally inverting them."

The speaker is Richard, a.k.a. "Junk," the proprietor of Satori Junk in Detroit, Michigan, and also the protagonist of Michael Zadoorian's terrific first novel, Second Hand. As the novel opens, Richard is facing a crisis in his life: his mother is dying of cancer and he and his sister are already disagreeing about how to handle the estate. When mom finally passes on, brother and sister begin a tug of war over her belongings that's as much about philosophy as it is about taste:

"Richard dear," Linda says, in her mock-sincere voice, touching my hand, not in a warm way, but a way calculated to make me feel some sibling obligation, "I don't really care if things get a good home. I would just like to be done with all this. I'd like to get rid of this stuff, sell the house and get on with my life."

Richard, on the other hand, does care, and begins a careful excavation of the "junk" his parents left behind. At the same time, he meets Theresa, an eccentric young woman with a horrific job: putting animals to sleep at the local humane society. Though the theme of unwanted animals as junk isn't exactly subtle, Zadoorian doesn't belabor the point, choosing instead to focus on the terrible toll that Theresa's work takes on her personal life.

As Richard and Theresa's relationship becomes both more intimate and more complicated, each takes refuge in private obsessions. For Richard, it is the history of his parents' marriage as revealed by the things they left behind; for Theresa, it is the Mexican Day of the Dead, whose promise of forgiveness alternately tempts and torments her. There's breaking up, making up, and a little philosophizing in between as these two junkyard lovers navigate the rocky road to romance, but Zadoorian does a terrific job of seamlessly weaving all the disparate threads into his narrative. By turns comic and wrenching, Second Hand builds incrementally to an emotional wallop that is as unexpected as it is effective. As Richard and Theresa finally realize their own true value in each others' eyes, Richard remarks, "our lives are lived in these moments, certain seconds here and there, snapshots only we can see and remember, in the way only we can remember them. They are the bric-a-brac of our lives." In the end, junk proves the perfect medium for Zadoorian to explore his characters' emotional lives. --Alix Wilber