The front copy of the novel compares this novel to James Joyce’s Dubliners. High praise… and sort of stock compliments for Irish writers post-dating ole Jamesy. But, as I read through the first half of the book, I kept finding myself agreeing: “Yep,” I would say (inside my head, obviously, I’m not going to sit there, quietly reading a book, interrupting the quiet with an occasional outburst of commentary), “the way she writes description definitely evokes Joyce, especially his short stories like ‘A Painful Case’. The unreliable narrator recalls details which make the scenes spring out in your mind, fully-formed.” (Perhaps you can see why I’m not saying this stuff out loud… what an a—hole I’d sound like, eh?)

I like the unreliable narrator in this case. Her holey (and holy) memories begin to mount during the course of her trip to fetch her brother Liam’s body from England, where he committed suicide by walking into the sea. But as they mount, you get the sense that there is a vast gaping hole in the middle, over which she’d shoveled more memories, and some of them have to do with the event that she may or may not have witnessed in her grandmother’s front room tens of years before which may or may not have led Liam to his eventual destination. And I was fully satisfied that maybe this was the way it was going to end; the death of a brother with whom the narrator had been close and now was no longer (even before his death) leaving holes in the narrator’s sense of her history and now future, as she struggles to make sense of her own life in relation to her brother’s.

But at the funeral, the gathering of the title, well, that hole is filled in like the soul she begins making sense of somewhere in the middle… and well, then the novel revealed its own soul. And sang.

I could understand someone not making it as far as that, if they got bogged down by the description and fluttering about of the histories of her grandmother, grandfather, Lamb Nugent, mother, father, and siblings. Someone who got fed up with the itch that the holes in the histories were making. But I’d also say that sticking it through to the end is well, well worth it.

I was expecting, though I can’t recall why, now, to be blown away by Ken Bruen’s tough guy character Jack Taylor.

Well, I wasn’t blown away, which I guess counts as a disappointment. It was a fair enough book, a quick enough read, but it was missing… something.
Or possibly it wasn’t missing enough. Ken’s character seemed just a bit too introspective, a bit too philosophical for a tough guy trying to track down a priest’s killer who may or may not have been justified in the killing.

I have The Guards (the first in the Jack Taylor series, I believe) somewhere in my bookshelf, but after this one, I’m not in any hurry to go out and start on that one. Sure, I’ll get to it at some point, but I’ve got a Joe Lansdale, Robert Parker, Donald Westlake, and even a Benjamin Black to try out before I get back to ol’ Kenny boy.

I really, really enjoyed this book. I’d heard about the odd choice of point-of-view for the story, but it worked incredibly well.

The book is written in the first person plural, about which I initially (before picking it up) had misgivings. But it worked really, really well. Even when the fact that this somewhat different point-of-view faded into the background and the narrative rose to the fore it was the perfect way to tell the story Joshua Ferris cooked up.

It’s the book most people think they can write; those people sitting in an office all day with their cubicles and assorted cubicle flotsam keeping them company along with thoughts of escaping to another desk, at home, in front of a typewriter or computer. Or maybe a comfy chair at a non-closed Starbucks, pretending to write that next great American novel of the workplace and its soul-blanching tedium.

The characters Ferris assembled in this office, and the odd bond they share over the course of events (and non-events) captures exactly what a lot of these would-be novelists experience, and experience to such a degree that they feel compelled to comment on the circumstances.

So Starbucks or cubicled novelists, listen up! Stop! You’re going to have to write something else. Maybe about the pleasant people in Starbucks. Or how your writing is significantly different when you write down the street in the Dunkin Donuts because the coffee’s better (well, the sugar levels are better) and the atmosphere is completely different. Who knows? But Joshua Ferris has done a fantastic job, from start to finish how a lot of these things end… and he does it lyrically.

A mini-review, if you will.

I didn’t like this book, at all, for the most part. Sure, it was funny. But for John O’Farrell, well, it wasn’t quite up to snuff. It was heavy-handed, awkward, and tedious, at times.

Until the end. About a page or two from the end, where I didn’t think he’d do anything at all to redeem the book and was just reading it to get it forever off my bedside table and banished to some mostly unreachable corner of the bookshelf, he did it. It may have been the germ that ignited the whole book for him, and he just got bogged down in the details along the way, or he may have finally hit his stride after dealing with these characters all the way along. But whatever it was, I would say the end was nearly worth it for me, slogging through all the rest.

The biggest flaw with this book so far (I’m about a third of the way through) is, like Jude: Level One, is that the back jacket copy compares the book to John Kennedy Toole’s excellent A Confederacy of Dunces. Whoops.

I desperately want to like this book (I have no idea why, though), but there’s no way it’s a patch on Confederacy… it’s fine, so far, if a bit heavy-handed and awkward in spots. So we’ll see how the rest of it goes.

Back on Gravity’s Rainbow in the lead up to our next child being born, as I expect I won’t have the a) energy or b) time to read for a few months after the little tyke shows up, cap in hand, at our doorstep, or down our chimney. Whichever.

At any rate, still a great read, it’s no wonder Pynchon appreciated the guest appearances on the Simpsons enough to appear a few times, himself, Imipolex G makes a few guest semi-hidden appearances throughout Slothrop’s time in bombed out Berlin…

Before Further Fenway Fiction came out, this was the Greatest Book Ever. Now it’s the second.

Still good, though, and well worth reading, for the seven Americans who continue to read, based on the last study.

This is possibly the greatest collection of fiction ever written.

Working through the author copies I received the other day.

I caught this book in the new Hughes & Hughes in Ennis, down by the river… the praise on the front cover: “Perfect, perfect comedy. A cross between Flann O’Brian, Father Ted, and Morrisey…” from Tommy Tiernan was what got me to pick it up and bring it home with me. Now, I know, you’re thinking, who is Tommy Tiernan to tell me what to read?

Well, no one, it turns out. The Irish comedian may have stormed America some time back, but his career as a book critic has, sadly, not taken off, as of yet. To be fair, it is slightly Flann O’Brian-ish. In that it mentions a bicycle or two. And it is certainly madcap like The Third Policeman or At Swim-Two-Birds. But is it a patch on those two books? Err, no. Then again, not many are.

I’ve just started the online continuation of the levels two and three that Julian Gough is writing, so it’s not over yet. But the bits I read (Level One through to the first 30 or so words of Level Two) were reasonably funny, entertaining, and, for the most part, witty. The jacket quote let me down a bit, but it’s not a bad way to pass your time.

I’ve read Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and had long been meaning to get into the Big Over Easy. As we’re now reading most of these nursery rhymes over again (and again, and again) to our 1+ year old, it seemed even more appropriate. I ran across the audio book in the Winchester library, picked it up, and listened to it over a few weeks on the short drive into work.

What an excellent, excellent book. The audio book is cast perfectly, Jasper Fforde is back with sparkling writing again, for the most part. I’m guessing the little break from the same characters and scenarios he’d done so well over and over again in the Thursday Next series was a major relief for himself, who, by the latest in the series, seemed to have hit a little bit of a rut.

Now this is what I imagined the godawful Gregory Macguire novels could have been. As it was, I struggled through Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and don’t think I’ll ever touch another thing written by Greg.

The book is funny, fun, and a great read. Or listen.