Helpful Score: 2
This mess doesn't simply disappoint me, it angers me. I'd say I finish most every book I start, no matter how awful. Less than one out of twenty reads will I find impossible to complete. But I loathed this book so much I have to create a new category: Books I finished accidentally, since I couldn't stop thinking "It Can't Get Any Worse!" but, nonetheless, DO. If it presented itself as nothing more than a trite pulp romance, then it would bug me much less than it does. It comes, however, smugly trumpeting its depth while displaying a profundity about as vast as the palate offered by some run-down chain restaurant in a decaying suburban strip mall. Complete with the least-convincingly-male narrator I've ever come across, its shallow attempts to portray a bohemian central character's âquirksâ as ominously inevitable signs of underlying, ultimately fatal, mental illness read like an Onion-style satire of banality masquerading as insight. The writing is not only just terrible, it's incompetence clearly believing its own alleged brilliance. To add insult to injury, the supposed âmysteryâ is âsolvedâ by something the narrator has known all along, but is conveniently withheld until one of the most tritely shoehorned plots in decades demands its revelation in order to bring this self-indulgent tripe to a close. Inexplicably, this book arrives highly recommended by some pretty impressive people whose taste (and/or sobriety while reading) must now all be called into question by default. Just. Astoundingly. Bad.
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