The Gimmicks: A Novel
In his debut novel, The Gimmicks, Chris McCormick weaves an unusual tale of three Armenians living in the long shadow of the Armenian genocide in the last decades of the 20th century. Avo and Ruben are brothers who aren’t really brothers but whose loyalty to the other is the encapsulation of that bond. Avo Gregoryan is a massively tall and imposing physical specimen who is drawn into the serious world of his “cousin’s cousin,” Ruben Petrosian. Where Avo is big, Ruben is small and spends his time studying the injustice of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, obsessed with making things right for his people. Ruben also plays professional backgammon and trains alongside his genius and luck-suffused rival, Mina. She constitutes the hypotenuse of their triangle and shares with the boys the world-shattering experience of one bucolic night’s tragedy that will forever set their stars on different courses.
Moving nimbly back and forth through time, McCormick follows the trio from the third world of 1970s Soviet Armenia to the bright and brutal ringside lights of the 1980s American professional wrestling scene. The story elegantly unfolds its characters’ intermingling tendrils of individual loyalties upon the greater backdrop of Armenian identity and pride, a trellis of life ever curling upward in hope and perseverance. In The Gimmicks, McCormick thoughtfully excavates the interior lives of three Armenians with unlikely pursuits—from competitive backgammon, small-time professional wrestling, all the way to the more seedy underbelly of Armenian political consciousness-raising—to reveal the costs of unquestioning loyalty and the sometimes inescapable burden of fate.
