Time and Memory: A Review of Great Disasters
September 30, 2025 | blog, book reviews, news
Review by Anjali Chanda, MFA ’27
Great Disasters
208 pp. Tin House Books. $17.99
Grady Chambers’s debut novel Great Disasters is distinguished by its melodic prose, delivered with a memorable lyricism, and its balance of the personal and political, something novels often neglect to do. Like many literary fiction pieces, Great Disasters rests in the cavity of the main character’s action (or, in this case, inaction), but that does not make the story any less impactful. Rather, it haunts the reader, the sign of a great novel.
Great Disasters follows thirty-something Graham Katz as he recounts his life from high school to present day. It opens in the wake of 9/11. Graham begins his freshman year with his six best friends. They play hockey, get drunk, protest the wars, and fall in love. We learn right away that alcohol is one of the great disasters of this novel, “but as much as it was drinking, it was Ryan’s love for Jana. And as much as it was Ryan’s love for Jana, it was equally the war” (8). After high school, while Graham and his friends head to colleges across the country, his friend Ryan enlists in the Marines. His absence is acutely felt through “Ryan’s cufflinks in [Graham’s] drawer, when [he hasn’t] heard his voice for years” (4).
Much of the novel exists in tangents, profound ruminations, or the films Graham loves—all of which craft the fierce insularity to his character, a person always on the outside. As an adult, he recognizes how “meek” he is, but he also understands why Ryan and his high school girlfriend, Jana, impacted him so much. Even at fifteen, Ryan and Jana “were two rare people who…were totally and wholly themselves, whereas [Graham] never felt [like he knew] who [he was]” (69).
Graham’s affection for Ryan is not the only thing that sets him apart from his friends. Now in his thirties, Graham is the last of them to outgrow their alcohol-fueled, teenage lifestyle. He faces small pockets of self-loathing during college and his mid-twenties, but his reflection comes later. After several friends get married and have children, they all travel to Long Island. There, one of his friend’s wives encourages Graham to drink water instead of whiskey, and he finally recognizes the deep depression he carries with him. It is one of many profound moments, but Graham’s misery is darkened even more by Ryan’s absence. All of his friends from high school are on Long Island, except Ryan. Graham eventually brings this up to his friends, but their recollection of high school is not nearly as pervasive as it feels for Graham. For them, it remains in the past, nothing more than a memory.
Graham’s ruminations are augmented by the political climate through which he is living. The novel begins right after 9/11 and takes us through the Trump presidency, and these major global events direct the narrative. While Ryan enlists, Graham spends his college years writing about Bush-era propaganda. Despite existing on the outskirts of these tragedies, Graham has an acute anxiety about all of the “great disasters” that could occur to him, even in moments of deep bliss and passivity. Much of this can be explained through mental unrest, but there is also a strong aspect of the sociological imagination here. Developed by sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959, the sociological imagination is the ability of placing one’s personal experiences within broader social contexts. Chambers does this brilliantly right from the start, noting how Ryan’s enlistment changes the course of the story. This novel takes the axiom “reading is not political” and turns it on its head. The disasters Graham feels on a personal level are also still great to us. They are great because they consume him, and we are consumed by his character.
But as direct as the politics can be, so much of this novel exists in the subtext, and even further, in the lies that Graham tells himself. In his last conversation with Ryan, Graham struggles to work up the courage to tell him that he loves him. At this point, they haven’t met in seventeen years, “and by then, the years since [Graham had] seen or spoken to Ryan were greater than the years [he’d] known him” (167). It is never clarified whether this love is romantic or platonic, but it is almost inconsequential. With this ambiguity, one would wonder why Chambers chose to make Graham as passive as he is, but that was precisely the point. The story is painfully realistic. Continuously, he lets the world pass over him, all the way up until the last page, echoing Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. I would like to believe the ending is the last time he lets himself be that way. That after the ending, maybe, something gets better.
There isn’t a strong indication that hope is a realistic outcome for him. After all, the book is titled Great Disasters. But Chambers winds us through 200 pages, stitching care for Graham like “weaving different sides of a giant tapestry—the different threads meeting, many years later, to reveal the broader picture” (8). There is more to his story. I can feel it. And I will always have hope for someone like that.
Grady Chambers is the author of the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More info at gradychambers.com.