Bill Cotter (2)
Forfatter af Fever Chart
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Om forfatteren
Bill Cotter was a pre-K art and music teacher for several years in New York City before making books for kids. His title Don't Push the Button Halloween made the best seller list in 2018. He currently lives in his hometown of Cleveland and spends his days drawing and playing music. (Bowker Author vis mere Biography) vis mindre
Værker af Bill Cotter
Pfaff II (in McSweeney's 30 - EGGERS) 1 eksemplar
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The main character, Jerome Coe (hmmh, I’m always suspicious when someone names a character with the initial J.C….) has two unfortunate conditions: 1) a mental illness somewhere in the schizophrenia family, and 2) luck so bad you’d think he molested a leprechaun.
Here’s Jerome: he’s an orphan in his twenties; he hops in and out of mental hospitals (escaped state institutions twice); he’s apparently cute if stalker-ish; and he sometimes completely loses it by hallucinating thought bubbles (like in comic books) and by going on a delusional rampage (more self-destructive than harming others.) He’s also intelligent, awkwardly naïve, neurotic about sex and relationships, and desperately means well. It’s this last quality that often leads him to really, really mess things up. Like getting-people-dead-by-accident messed up.
The good:
• Never a dull moment in the plot.
• Written with vivid attention to detail without being pretentious or wordy.
• Has an engaging energy, teetering on cartoonish without going over.
• Witty. The first half of the book made me giggle in a this-shouldn’t-be-funny-but-it-is kind of way. Like laughing at poor old Charlie Chaplin’s ridiculous scrapes.*
The bad:
• Jerome can be so goddamn hapless, I just wanted to scream at him and knock some sense into him.
• Second half of the book has some really nasty things happen, the nastiest being something Jerome witnesses the love-of-his-life do when she thinks he isn’t watching. No spoilers, but there’s something that smacked of authorial manipulation to the extent that it made me feel uncomfortable. Sexist? Maybe not but definitely objectifying.
• Last third of the book, everything collapsed for me. I was reading fast, sometimes skimming, just to get to the end. Yes, I wanted to know how it ended, but I didn’t really care about the details anymore because Cotter had lost me by this point, the story had become too far-fetched.
I realized half-way through reading this that it was a McSweeney’s Book. I’ve avoided McSweeney’s because it has struck me as pretentious and a cult of personality. Not sure if Fever Chart is representative of other work they publish or not, but I’d be willing give another book in their catalog a go. It had enough rewarding material in it to make it a good read. 3½ stars.
*If you haven’t seen Modern Times, I highly recommend it. One of my favorite movies of all time. It’s on Netflix here: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Modern_Times/60028129?trkid=2361637
… (mere)