October 5–12, 2000

book quicks

Second Hand

Second Hand is a love story with a little death and a lot of stuff. Sex, death and stuff: It happens to all of us, whether we seek it out or not.

Richard, the hero of Second Hand, runs a junk shop on the outskirts of Detroit. His parents die, leaving him with the task of sorting through their things so he and his sister can sell the house. Ending a long dry spell, he meets a woman who has the unfortunate job of working at an animal shelter, putting unwanted pets to death after seven days.

The symbolism of haunted objects and spirits moving on may be obvious when they’re laid out like that in plain view, but there is magic in the way first-time novelist Zadoorian puts it all together. Richard hunts down "cool" stuff primarily, which hipsters snap up after a hefty markup, but kitschy irony is not in effect here. Zadoorian makes a few distinctions in his cast of thrift-shopping characters. There are those who need to shop in thrift stores for financial reasons, and those who do it out of love for old, kooky and unusual things. There are also those who buy frying pans to make grilled cheese sandwiches, and those who will buy them for purely personal reasons: When Richard attends an estate sale in his childhood house, an unexpected bidding war over one of his mother’s cast iron skillets becomes a ghastly funny tragi-comic scene.

Anyone who haunts the thrifts will recognize themselves in this book. But extremely detailed lists of cool stuff can’t compete with an ending that connects these literal and symbolic ghosts of objects in our past.

—Alex Richmond