Whew. This book – this book was a doozy. Not in a Dickens or Shakespeare way,
either. It was good, not great. As implied by the title, it takes place over
the course of a day. There’s some
dialogue, but mostly it’s the train of thought of a seventeen year old
boy.
Probably time to admit that I
bought this book because I really liked the cover very much. (This method usually works well, contrary to
the old adage.)
Back to the doozy-ness. After I hit the 100th page I could
never go very long without looking at the page numbers to see if I was almost
done. The answer was always, almost
always no. Like I said, it’s a day’s events and thoughts
of a teenage boy; to make matters worse, the boy is one of those
fake-philisophicals. I’m all for philosophers
(minored in it and everything), I’m not all for obnoxious kids pretending to be
ponderous and turning every little thing into a question. It’s dense and rambling.
Also, there are no effing
paragraphs. I mean there are, but one
paragraph can go on for two pages. Maddening,
especially when you need to stop reading to get a drink or something.
I started this book around
three or four years ago, when I was only two or three years out from being that obnoxious kid, and I remember
liking the book a lot when I first picked it up. For the annoying philosophy but also because
I related to the kid – dysfunctional family, playing the role of parent, etc. Fast forward a few years and I still enjoyed
the book, but I was very annoyed by it as well.
I have my own bothersome, exasperating train of thought, so it felt a
little wasteful spending my time reading that of someone else.
Would I recommend it? Eh. If
you’re crazy about coming of age stories, yes.
(But with the disclaimer that it’s filled to the brim with eye-roll-inducing
musings about girls’ eyes. Among other
things.) And also if you can handle a
lack of riveting plot.
But! There were a few good things. One, he paints a beautiful picture of the
city. From the smells to the sounds to
the little butcher shop, you feel like you’re there and you never want to leave. In one scene the boy, Wes, and his friend and
little sister are sitting on the front stoop of his townhouse, the former two
drinking a beer. The friend, James,
thinks that’s the best thing in the world.
Wes agrees and I agree. If you’ve
ever lived in a city or wanted to live in a city, you can understand why. Sitting on a stoop with your friends taking
everything in IS the best thing in
the world.
Pretty sure I’ve digressed.
The really good thing about
this kind of inner-monologue writing is that it sometimes puts into words
thoughts that many of us have. I jotted
down a few lines from it:
“It had not been a string of thoughts at all, but a moment of pure
insight.”
Hey! I know how that feels! You’re talking about an epiphany of
sorts!
“...but the anger that, by rights, should have been expressed as
love. There was hardly anything to
choose between them, the love and the anger, but James’ uncle and Wes’ father
had just missed coming down on the right side of the divide, and it had
destroyed their lives.”
Wowsa yeah. I made a mental post-it note of sorts to keep
this in mind.
“Somewhere along the line, everywhere at every moment, there must be a
lot of people in the process of becoming the very thing they swore they would
never become.”
Okay, so it’s typical
coming-of-age stuff, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be alright.
“Wes thought there must be a way to make life more like cooking – a series
of recipes that could be followed faithfully to predictable results.”
I’m of age and still wish for
this.
And of course, some random
thoughts I had while reading the book:
·
There are a lot of literary references. I read a
lot now but there are a lot of classics still left on my list so I did not get
all of the references. It occurred to me
that this might be a book 19 year old Rory Gilmore would read (and she’d
understand all the references!), though I don’t think it’d be one she
loves.
·
“Burdens in hand” is nice writing.
·
Wes would like Agatha Christie
·
It’s intense.
·
The author must really like Bob Ross.
Overall, eh. In the beginning of his day, Wes begins the
process of cooking sweetbreads.
Throughout the book he carries out certain steps of the cooking process. Let’s just say I was more concerned with how
the sweetbreads (which sounds disgusting, btw) would turn out than I was with
how his love life would work out.
The storyline just wasn’t too
intriguing. Fine but not special.
At the end, Wes learns a few
good lessons (I won’t share them in case any of you choose to read it – no spoilers! Book review, not book report, I guess.), and
all is semi-well with the world. It was
a sweet story… it just would have been sweeter if it was shorter. And less bulky. I don’t regret reading it, though.
Toward the end of the novel,
Wes says this about War and Peace:
A thousand pages of nothing; even ten thousand would have been
insufficient to describe one minute of a real person’s life.
And yet, that’s exactly what
the author attempts. And you can feel
how hard he’s trying.
Read it, don’t read it - you
do you.
__
Charlotte
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