Reviews

Commonwealth by Joey Goebel

gjmaupin's review against another edition

2.0

For starters, I haven't finished a book since early December, what with life and art and all getting in the way. I read the first chapter of Steinbeck's The Log of the Sea of Cortez, but we got busy and it was abandoned for later. Probably not much later. But we'll see.

I really loved (and recommend) Goebel's The Anomalies, to a great deal because of how unjudged everyone was. But I felt like the deck was so stacked in this one that the characters (which were great) were betrayed by an occasionally puppetmastering author.

Also (a pet peeve that's difficult to express) the way Goebel brings in the branded world is, to me, clumsy. Phrases like "and then they played a Justin Timberlake song called 'SexyBack,'" or "people crowded into the drive-in to see the new Will Ferrell movie." They get at me. To me a choice has to be made - either the vibe of the type of song/movie/product/brand name is important or the specific time-capsule of The Historical Moment is important, or maybe both, but it comes out so clunkily, as if an otherwise fairly wise narrator has suddenly become his grandparents - "and then they got out this new-fangled gadget the kids are talkin about the you may not have heard of, so I'll give it a more precise mention than is strictly necessary." And it ends up coming across as either condescention ("and WE know what kind of people drive THOSE trucks") or deck-stacking ("and you THINK you know what kind of people drive THOSE trucks") combined with a cowardice that the reader won't get his cultural references. And it takes me so far out of the world that it takes some doing to get me back in.

Still, wonderful characters. And it made me want to read the (much more concise and punchy) Anomalies again. (If there's similar cultural shorthand in that one, it's about 1/4 the length of Commonwealth and therefore easier to overlook.)

serap19's review against another edition

emotional funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.0

cwebb's review against another edition

2.0

http://www.weberseite.at/buecher/commonwealth-joey-goebel/

tonyhightower's review against another edition

3.0

For a novel that sets out to satirize and illustrate the assorted sillinesses of the American class system, from the blow-your-mind wealthy to the blow-your-mind poor, the reach of "Commonwealth" exceeds its grasp by a long stretch; but don't let that stop you from giving this book a shot.



Blue Gene Mapother comes from old money, and wants none of it. Having never felt accepted by his family, he soon moves into a trailer and finds a semblance of happiness selling toys at a flea market after the local Wal-Mart he was working at closed down. Soon, though, his brother John, a recovering addict, decides to run for Congress, and the Mapother family, each with their own motives, decides to do what they can to get him elected. Blue Gene reluctantly agrees, until he meets a punk rock singer who opens his eyes to what's going on around him. Blue Gene's social and spiritual awakening is the meat of the story.



For stories like this to work as comedy of manners, you need one sane and sympathetic character at the center who reacts the way the reader would. Joey Goebel's attempts to have Blue Gene serve as that character don't really work.



He's a fascinating character; the one thing immensely wealthy and immensely poor people have in common is that the rest of us never really see them, and that bliind spot seems to suit Blue Gene just fine. But he's not a fully multidimensional human being, and neither is anyone else in the book. His apocalypse-obsessed mother, his father, openly contemptuous of any and all who have less money and influence than he does (so, everyone), his the-bottle-led-me-straight-to-Jesus brother, the openly racist military brat with the hair-trigger temper and the huge chip on his shoulder, the skinny punk rock girl-love interest with all the right answers and a speech for every occasion, and everyone else in the large cast of this story, all of them are archetypes, clearly placed in the story to serve a specific purpose. None of them pop cleanly into full human bloom, and that's unfortunate.



But that doesn't mean "Commonwealth" isn't worth reading. It's a quick-flowing 500 pages, with a plot that never stops moving. (You can see why Tom Robbins really liked this book; it reads like an early draft of something he'd have written himself.) It's just that there isn't anything in "Commonwealth," or in the character makeup of Blue Gene Mapother, that wasn't better executed in, say, Mike Magnuson's masterpiece "The Right Man For The Job," another novel about a lower-class lummox clinging to the bottom rung of society and looking for his personal guardian angel.



But Joey Goebel is a fine young writer, and "Commonwealth" is a fine read. He's going to get better at this. Keep him in mind.