“It took me like a year to read this book, but I did it!
You might be wondering why I would bother to read a book I wasn’t enjoying. It’s complicated.
It’s complicated because I WAS enjoying it, but I didn’t have a lot of momentum with it. And…I started wondering if I’m just not into this kind of book anymore.
I LOVED novels like this in my early 20’s. I’d read multiple in a week. Books that were about normal-ish people, but a little strange, a little twisted, a little funny. And now I don’t know if I have the patience or the passion or whatever it is that got me through so many books like this not so long ago.
I don’t know if I’m all that interested in novels anymore. Which is a very weird feeling for me, but I have to admit, doubt has crept in. I might not be all that interested in made-up, longform fiction anymore. It might be a reading rut, but maybe this is the new me. It’s hard to know. Maybe I’ll read another killer novel soon, but I’m doubtful. I “discovered” that I liked Stephen King only a couple years ago, but I’m not so confident that there’s another of him out there for me to find. And the novels that swept me away have been fewer over the last 5 to 10 years. I pick up WAY more of them that I read a few pages of before I just think, “Eh, who cares?”
Maybe this is my mid-life crisis. Pete’s mid-life crisis manifests with him being sort of “meh” on novels. I guess that’s not so bad. It doesn’t involve having sex with someone way too young for me, wasting money on a fancy car, or really finding myself by taking a trip to Thailand. That last one probably doesn’t sound bad to most of you, but trust me, I’m not going to return from a long-ass vacation a better person. That’s just not how I’m built.
It could be this book. This book is REALLY long. It’s 560 pages, which doesn’t sound that long, but there are like 4 different books in here. There’s a section about a pair of brothers, a section about the brothers grown up, a section about the older brother alone, a section by/about the older brother’s son, a section that moves back to the older brother, another section after that, and ANOTHER after that.
There were a lot of ridiculous, fun things in here. A man builds his home in the middle of an enormous labyrinth because he doesn’t like other people very much, and visitors are constantly getting lost and requiring rescue. These are the sorts of things I enjoyed a lot. There were some parts that were satisfyingly poignant, yet not saccharine, which worked. It’s a father/son relationship that felt very real to me, a not-so-great dad and a son who felt on one hand like his dad could have done better by him, and on the other like he DID have the chance to be raised by a weirdo, which isn’t what happens for everyone. The book lets characters have their moments in ways that feel natural to those characters.
There’s just A LOT of stuff in this book. I really think the author was like, “Fuck it, I’m not saving anything for another book. They might only let me do this once, and I’m going for it.” Which I admire. At the same time, it felt like the book had a lot of jumping off points, places where you could say, “You know, I’m good.””