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chelseamartinez's review
3.0
If you were not a neurotic person before reading this book, you will be afterwards. Darn it if you don't feel like you know the protagonist better than your own brother by the end of the near 800 pages though.
sentient_meat's review
5.0
Do authors still write career defining novels. Probably not. Frog is Dixon at his best. Stories upon stories. Modern novels aren't dead, they just aren't written by Stephen King
garleighc's review
2.0
Ugh this was one long stream-of-consciousness mess. I'm not kidding, there was one paragraph that went on for like 20 pages and contained a whole story, dialogue and all. What's more, sometimes there were small mistakes with the quotation marks, which made trying to navigate lengthy conversations between a few characters all shoved into one huge block paragraph even more difficult.
I get that this work is huge in how the main character, Howard Tetch, has so many different possible lives within the stories. In some he has a wife and two kids, in some he loses his wife or one of his kids, in some he never had a wife or kids to begin with but he's pursuing that sort of life in his future. Yeah, great concept. I appreciate the idea here. But to me, there wasn't enough of an overlying concept to tie all these possibilities together. And that just made it confusing. Plus, Howard Tetch is also representative of the average American Joe, and so the stories were at times boring as well as confusing.
Lastly: There was SO. MUCH. SEX. And it was annoying. Just because we're getting an intimate picture of Howard's life or what could have been his life does not mean we need to know every single one of his sexual exploits or endeavors he wished he'd had in excruciating, technicolor detail. Which is what sections of this work amounted to. I'm still not clear as to how this enhanced the plot.
All in all, just a huge stinking heap of lewd prose with the occasional sentence or phrase that really stood out and made almost 800 pages worth the slog. But then, maybe I completely missed the point.
I get that this work is huge in how the main character, Howard Tetch, has so many different possible lives within the stories. In some he has a wife and two kids, in some he loses his wife or one of his kids, in some he never had a wife or kids to begin with but he's pursuing that sort of life in his future. Yeah, great concept. I appreciate the idea here. But to me, there wasn't enough of an overlying concept to tie all these possibilities together. And that just made it confusing. Plus, Howard Tetch is also representative of the average American Joe, and so the stories were at times boring as well as confusing.
Lastly: There was SO. MUCH. SEX. And it was annoying. Just because we're getting an intimate picture of Howard's life or what could have been his life does not mean we need to know every single one of his sexual exploits or endeavors he wished he'd had in excruciating, technicolor detail. Which is what sections of this work amounted to. I'm still not clear as to how this enhanced the plot.
All in all, just a huge stinking heap of lewd prose with the occasional sentence or phrase that really stood out and made almost 800 pages worth the slog. But then, maybe I completely missed the point.
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