Saturday, August 31, 2013
Rising disappointment
I finished the novel
Yes. That is an ampersand in the title apparently because a novel written by the principle character was called Ampersand and, as it turns out, the main character has some sons who provide most of the story. One son is a failed movie guy in one or two failed relationships who devotes his career to downer documentaries. I have seen a few of these.
Another son was nothing but an addict and alcoholic (!) until he got sober and now he has a good life as a drug counsellor, evidently a good one, with a nice family. Two kids we hear a lot about and a wonderful wife.
The third son is a half brother, the product of a liaison between the father, a famed author and rotten father and an au pair who disappears pregnant then turns up dead with the Dad taking the young son on.
The narration is by a close friend of the sons, a nasty resentful failure who also is without a family or wife and whose main job for now seems to be in telling us this story.
But he is not a reliable historian. He is an unproduced film writer and, well, I don't know. It ends up being, perhaps, a novel about a novelist with some of his work included in an account by a writer who may be telling a parallel story to the truth and there is too much of it that is bizarre. The idea of cloning a son or thinking one is cloned then, well, OK, gratuitously killing him dead, struck by a bus, in the last tenth of the book. Too much. Too little.
Why did I get this book? I read the review and wonder. Certainly I read it before I bought the book. I know that I did. But the review in the Sunday Magazine is as grouchy. Ahhh, it was the New Yorker. Well, fuck them.
It did keep me busy and happy for the first half and then it got both unbelievable and tedious. Samples of the great man's writing which I could not read. Awful. Is this intentional? The narrator having some revenge or just not good writing.
In any case, I did want to finish it so I FF it as I would a film that had some good parts and then some shitty parts.
I would give that film a 2 out of 5 and I will do that here with this book.
Labels: books
