beer good
Well-Known Member
This book reminded me, above all, of two books - one which I read a long time ago and loved, one which I read recently and hated. The first is Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", the second is Ron McLarty's "The memory of running". Occasionally I found myself referring to "Lolita" as well.
As in all those three novels, it's about a journey both across the US and into the human soul; the book starts off with the nameless narrator's wife disappearing, car and all, while he's run in to the gas station to buy a candybar. At least, that's what he claims. He goes home - obviously in shock - and the next day buys a new car and tries to track her down. As he drives West from their Brooklyn home, running into various other more-or-less weird characters - yoga practitioners, Indians, old hippies, beer-swilling rednecks, even *gasp* Englishmen and the obligatory love interest - he tries to figure out not only what happened to her but how it affected him and what it's still doing to him... and obviously the unreliable narrator thing is in full effect. Right from the get-go you get the feeling that there's something he's not admitting - whether to the reader or to himself we don't know.
What I liked about the book is how it really stretches beyond the limitations of its plot; much like Pirsig, the narrator takes the basic premise of the story as an excuse to do some deep soul-searching and try to figure out what makes him tick as a human being. In that, it becomes something more than just will-he-or-won't-he-find-his-wife. And of course, he has a few twists to spring on us; none exactly unexpected, but nicely executed. However, while the book isn't quite as nauseatingly Forrestgumpish as McLarty's book, it's also way overwritten and while the narrator's view of life, love and loss and how we perceive them - and he really gets metaphysical on our asses - is interesting, it also gets too much sometime. He could have made it much more subtle and gotten the same result without quite as many psychology 101 touches. There's only so much you can enjoy of a fairly unsympathetic and dullish character psychoanalyzing himself for 260 pages.
A nice effort, moving and definitely worth reading, but not the masterpiece the blurbs hail it as. 3/5.
As in all those three novels, it's about a journey both across the US and into the human soul; the book starts off with the nameless narrator's wife disappearing, car and all, while he's run in to the gas station to buy a candybar. At least, that's what he claims. He goes home - obviously in shock - and the next day buys a new car and tries to track her down. As he drives West from their Brooklyn home, running into various other more-or-less weird characters - yoga practitioners, Indians, old hippies, beer-swilling rednecks, even *gasp* Englishmen and the obligatory love interest - he tries to figure out not only what happened to her but how it affected him and what it's still doing to him... and obviously the unreliable narrator thing is in full effect. Right from the get-go you get the feeling that there's something he's not admitting - whether to the reader or to himself we don't know.
What I liked about the book is how it really stretches beyond the limitations of its plot; much like Pirsig, the narrator takes the basic premise of the story as an excuse to do some deep soul-searching and try to figure out what makes him tick as a human being. In that, it becomes something more than just will-he-or-won't-he-find-his-wife. And of course, he has a few twists to spring on us; none exactly unexpected, but nicely executed. However, while the book isn't quite as nauseatingly Forrestgumpish as McLarty's book, it's also way overwritten and while the narrator's view of life, love and loss and how we perceive them - and he really gets metaphysical on our asses - is interesting, it also gets too much sometime. He could have made it much more subtle and gotten the same result without quite as many psychology 101 touches. There's only so much you can enjoy of a fairly unsympathetic and dullish character psychoanalyzing himself for 260 pages.
A nice effort, moving and definitely worth reading, but not the masterpiece the blurbs hail it as. 3/5.