Imagine David Lynch collaborating with Alexander Payne and you've got something close, but not quite as interesting as this book. I've found a kindred spirit here. Antrim's prose style carries the reader along as though he were a leaf on briskly moving creek. He is able to make wildly imaginative leaps, transitioning from past to present memory, yet still maintain a coherent undertow of pathos. This book has everything I look for in a story (though I would consider this a novel length short story rather than a novel).

I'm definitely going to be reading everything by this author and I'd encourage anyone else to at least check this one out. ( )

Imagine David Lynch collaborating with Alexander Payne and you've got something close, but not quite as interesting as this book. I've found a kindred spirit here. Antrim's prose style carries the reader along as though he were a leaf on briskly moving creek. He is able to make wildly imaginative leaps, transitioning from past to present memory, yet still maintain a coherent undertow of pathos. This book has everything I look for in a story (though I would consider this a novel length short story rather than a novel).

I'm definitely going to be reading everything by this author and I'd encourage anyone else to at least check this one out. ( )

My Young Gentleman Caller hefted a bin for me today, its lid slipped, and this book bonked his noggin. Bin safely deposited, piffling nature of injury established (to my satisfaction if not his, I suspect he was angling for sympathy/guilt banana bread as his desire for more of that comestible is a refrain in our recent conversations), I picked up the book and was right back in the Sixth Avenue B. Dalton circa 1994. (The receipt tells me I bought the book December 8, 1994. Computer POS precision noted.)

At that time I was gadding about Lower Manhattan in a haze of grief for my dead lover, mid-30s-male sexual hunger, and frustrated seeking for a hit in my newish career as a literary agent. Numbing pain via reading was an old, old habit of mine. This novel's premise, which nowadays we'd call bizarro, was so askew that I was sure I'd be diverted and possibly edified.

Like so many expectations....

So the read itself was successful, I kept the book somehow in spite of literally thousands of others falling away; but damned if I want to re-read it. Antrim's first novel is jam-packed with brio. His narrative voice isn't assured, it tries too hard to clever-clever its way out of some cul-de-sacs with limited success, but still tells a true story. Ours was then a country of receding community ethic, a sense of a destiny shared was eroding ever-faster, and its lack of usability as a ground-cover in the garden we're supposed to be maintaining was alarming to many of us.

As a reminder, the first government shut-down was almost a year away but had already been set in motion by the politically tone-deaf Clintons proposing a National Health Insurance Plan that would've saved tens of thousands from death or debilitating debt. (I never said they were wrong, just tone-deaf.) Antrim's Civil War fit beautifully into that deep and accelerating fault line's growth under the national garden's soil. His satirical intentions were spot-on. His storytelling voice wasn't quite up to the task but he was close enough for me at that time.

So today (post-boo boo kissing) I picked the book up for the first time in many long years, flipped around, and was chuckling again. I told the mildly sulky YGC Rob why I wasn't continuing to fuss over him and, I am gratified to report, sent the book home with him after I sold it by mentioning missile attacks on a gated community and drawing-and-quartering by Subaru.

Since it's a story with far greater relevance to today's 20-somethings than even to my then-30-something self, I'm hopeful it will reinforce his sense that the morality he sees enacted around him is pathological and not emulatable. And I'm enormously tickled in the vanity area that owning a book that I demonstrably bought for myself on a particular date before he was born made him covet the object.

Everybody wins. Like it should be. ( )

This would be 3 1/2 stars if Goodreads had a better scale (why not out of a hundred? If you can't make such fine distinctions, rank books as 0/20/40/60/80/100 like they do on Criticker sometimes) ... it's very well-written, held my interest throughout, but I have to really enjoy a book to give it 4 stars, not just find it worthy. But it succeeds at what it set out to do and I have no editing suggestions, so I'm rounding up. (5 stars are for all-time favourites--the creme-de-la-creme).

This weird, strange book shows how to do weird and strange in a compelling and elegant manner (take that, Welcome to Night Vale!). There is a central conceit (society has collapsed in some unspecified way and Americans have increasingly turned violent) that is played out in a polite suburban setting, and then there is a dollop of extra weirdness (some dangerous identification with a spirit animal) that may be related to the central conceit, or may not, but if it was I didn't see it. And all the strangeness and weirdness springs naturally from the central conceit (aside from the spirit animal business), and makes sense, given the context (whereas Night Vale, which I also just finished, has a zillion inexplicable unrelated oddities that I found offputting).

It's an amusing book, but also a very dark book (it would have to be), with an especially upsetting ending (although it could be worse, I guess). As others have said, this one will stay with you. Not my cup of tea, because I vastly prefer Pride and Prejudice to Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, put I appreciated the satire, and have learned that I do prefer my post-apocalyptic fiction to be suburban-set rather than upon miles of dusty roads.

Oh, and because this may make a difference either way to undecided potential readers, this reads like Literature and not like Genre Fiction, not to suggest in any way that Literature is automatically better than Genre Fiction (any more than Classical Music beats Pop Music), just that they're not the same thing at all (see many, many essays on the increasingly blurred difference). ( )

I had heard that this was a fantastic debut novel. And the synopsis sounded intriguing. So I put it on The List. When I found a copy at my used bookstore, I picked it up. When I saw how slim it was, I thought it was perfect for National Readathon Day.

And I did finish it, in just over 2 hours. So I suppose I have to give Antrim credit for keeping me interested for 185 pages. I've walked away from other books altogether.

But this just doesn't work for me. There are shades of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, in the absurdity here; there are shades of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, in the lack of structure (there are no chapters - it all just comes out of Pete Robinson's mouth at once). The circularity of the story, the looseness of time within it... Not sure where but I've seen that before, too. But it doesn't come together in a way that grabs me.

There's a lot to plumb here: starting with - no pun intended - the community's drainage problem; the transformations into animals; the sacrifice of a town leader, the desecration of his corpse, & Pete's attempts to make it right with ancient burial practices. Perhaps if I had read this with a class or a book club, I'd be thinking this was brilliant. But I didn't, so I don't.

Read at your risk. Chances are you have something better to do with your time.
( )