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kingjason's review against another edition
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
I does like me a bit of autofiction, the journey into the mind of the author with all the many distractions and thoughts colliding with each other is very much the style I use when doing a review, as I’m writing this I just came up with a fantastic ending to this review…of course by the time I get there I won’t remember what the idea was, such is the life of a rambler. This book was a very pleasant read, I think most people would sit down and be drawn in like I was, you’ll soon be nodding along in agreement with the protagonist’s opinions, you’ll be chuckling to yourself as the plans for a Trump assassination are laid out before the reader.
At the heart of this book is a love of family, music and edibles, these thoughts are explored whilst watching a concert, the anxieties we have once you have found your partner/had a child/got a mortgage always creep upon you when you least expect it. Here the thoughts start to wander whilst waiting for the roadies to do their bit and the bands to start their set, it was interesting witnessing the back and forth with the consciousness wondering if he had made the right life choices and convincing himself that yes he has achieved everything he set himself when young, this is all interrupted with more thoughts, this time on how he will get home after the show or whether he should get a new amp. There are also those morbid thoughts you sometimes have, what will you do if a gunman entered the room and started shooting, these obsessions almost overwhelmed our hero. It’s all written really well, the flow is spot on and whilst reading you realise that you’re not that different…who hasn’t wanted to be a rock star or the person to take out the Trump?
As for that great ending? I have forgotten it so instead I’ll end with, this book starts with the main guy taking an edible so maybe the book should come with a free edible? A good fun read that very much feels like it was taken right from my head.
euanwhosearmy's review against another edition
4.0
Back in 2014, Barrelhouse Books published Lee Klein’s Thanks and Sorry and Good Luck, a collection of relentlessly honest, often hilarious rejection letters sent during Klein’s time running the literary magazine Eyeshot. A book of rejection letters might sound like an unkind gimmick which, even if done well, would stop being funny after a couple of pages, but there’s something about the blunt force of Klein’s responses which easily sustains its page count. There’s snark, sure, but there is also heart and appreciation and an expectation that people should be writing good things.
Neutral Evil ))) has a similarly unlikely set-up, one which in the hands of many writers would be completely insufferable: autofiction in which a bearded thirty-something takes some edibles, goes to a drone metal show and muses on US domestic politics, social media and guitar pedals.
Nope nope nope. Even as a 120-page novella, just nope. And I enjoy drone metal.
Happily, and unsurprisingly given Klein’s previous work, the framing device—March 18, 2017, at a Sunn O))) show in Philadelphia, just two months into the current US presidency—is simply used as a way to reflect on a moment in time and the frame of mind of the narrator. The story is about a man adjusting to the demands of a young family, sure, but he’s setting into it, not rebelling against the constraints. The time spent at the show is a gift of sorts from his wife, some time off before she leaves for a business trip and he is on toddler duty for a week.
It’s the thoughts of the narrator, and the feeling of thought in general, which Klein depicts so well in Neutral Evil ))). There’s a looseness and lightness to the writing which reads like thinking, with tangents, unlikely plans, and memories interrupted and shunted around by the real world.
You might not care as much as the narrator does about guitar amps, but that’s fine. He’s not aiming to impress. This is simply a snapshot of a moment in a life, deftly captured.
-
This review first appeared on the website of Structo magazine.
Neutral Evil ))) has a similarly unlikely set-up, one which in the hands of many writers would be completely insufferable: autofiction in which a bearded thirty-something takes some edibles, goes to a drone metal show and muses on US domestic politics, social media and guitar pedals.
Nope nope nope. Even as a 120-page novella, just nope. And I enjoy drone metal.
Happily, and unsurprisingly given Klein’s previous work, the framing device—March 18, 2017, at a Sunn O))) show in Philadelphia, just two months into the current US presidency—is simply used as a way to reflect on a moment in time and the frame of mind of the narrator. The story is about a man adjusting to the demands of a young family, sure, but he’s setting into it, not rebelling against the constraints. The time spent at the show is a gift of sorts from his wife, some time off before she leaves for a business trip and he is on toddler duty for a week.
I’m aware of my thoughts in a way that makes me aware that I haven’t been aware of my thoughts recently. They’ve been benevolently suppressed by routine, by action, or whenever they asserted themselves I elevated their status to that of a tweet, but in general I’m now beginning to realize that I haven’t been thinking, I haven’t had sufficient unoccupied free-range time alone to hear myself think, and now it seems I have an hour or more to myself in a crowd of mostly young men willing to pay $22 to stand and listen to super-loud low-frequency drone-doom minimalist-metal in a converted Spaghetti Warehouse.
It’s the thoughts of the narrator, and the feeling of thought in general, which Klein depicts so well in Neutral Evil ))). There’s a looseness and lightness to the writing which reads like thinking, with tangents, unlikely plans, and memories interrupted and shunted around by the real world.
You might not care as much as the narrator does about guitar amps, but that’s fine. He’s not aiming to impress. This is simply a snapshot of a moment in a life, deftly captured.
-
This review first appeared on the website of Structo magazine.
jeffchon's review
5.0
My friends and I joke about how some books would be dangerous in the wrong hands. What we mean by that is, through sheer brilliance, certain writers can get away with things that lesser writers (the wrong hands) would turn into a disastrous pile of garbage. I don’t quite know if that’s objectively true, but the entire time I was reading this book, I kept thinking, “Man, thank God this book was in the right hands.”
The title: Neutral Evil )))--Neutral Evil, as in evil for evil’s sake; the triple ))) to signify the triple parentheses Trump-era Nazis have used to identify Jewish people on Twitter (and appropriated by Jews as a middle finger to fascism)--good God. By only using a trio of closed parentheses, Klein is also paying tribute to Sunn O))), the ambient noise metal band that plays a prominent role in the narrator’s thoughts. Those triple parentheses evoke soundwaves, like Aquaman’s telepathic waves when he calls marine creatures to do his bidding on the old Superfriends cartoon. Klein’s sentences unfurl in the same way as those telepathic waves, like the sub-bass at a Sunn O))) concert, their vibrations radiating outward, causing the “watery surface of our eyes [to] ripple.”
The plot: On the 58th day of the Trump presidency, our protagonist ingests edibles and makes his way to a Sunn O))) concert, where he muses on homelessness, the lechery of younger men, political assassinations, Francis Bacon’s Van Gogh studies, the ill-fated Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan, Jose Saramago, Kung Fu Panda, and so on and so forth in the ways our brains go “)))” after we’ve ingested edibles. It’s a longform lyric essay masquerading as a novella about fatherhood and middle age, about life in the early stages of Trump’s America, and an engagingly rambling concert review written by a man on pot cookies. Everything the narrator addresses, from presidential assassination to capitalism to basic human kindness is told in the manner of a stoned person’s long, oblique sentences with all the digressions and deep mental dives down the rabbit hole completely intact. Easily the most immersive reading experience I’ve had in a long time. It’s like one of those photo mosaic posters, where the big picture is comprised of a grid of tinier photos. There’s so much here to soak in and really examine, and it’s clear a musician wrote this book.
I honestly can’t say I’ve ever read anything like this. It’s like wandering into someone’s fever dream. Being forced to stay in the moment with the narrator until he was done with me really led to understanding his obsessions in what I can only describe as transcendent. I’m still honestly trying to wrap my head around how in the holy hell Lee Klein got away with this. The reason he got away with it is because he’s just that damn good, but still. I feel like Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now, just wildly gesticulating and shouting, “I’m a little man. I’m a little man. I should’ve been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas!”
)))
The title: Neutral Evil )))--Neutral Evil, as in evil for evil’s sake; the triple ))) to signify the triple parentheses Trump-era Nazis have used to identify Jewish people on Twitter (and appropriated by Jews as a middle finger to fascism)--good God. By only using a trio of closed parentheses, Klein is also paying tribute to Sunn O))), the ambient noise metal band that plays a prominent role in the narrator’s thoughts. Those triple parentheses evoke soundwaves, like Aquaman’s telepathic waves when he calls marine creatures to do his bidding on the old Superfriends cartoon. Klein’s sentences unfurl in the same way as those telepathic waves, like the sub-bass at a Sunn O))) concert, their vibrations radiating outward, causing the “watery surface of our eyes [to] ripple.”
The plot: On the 58th day of the Trump presidency, our protagonist ingests edibles and makes his way to a Sunn O))) concert, where he muses on homelessness, the lechery of younger men, political assassinations, Francis Bacon’s Van Gogh studies, the ill-fated Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan, Jose Saramago, Kung Fu Panda, and so on and so forth in the ways our brains go “)))” after we’ve ingested edibles. It’s a longform lyric essay masquerading as a novella about fatherhood and middle age, about life in the early stages of Trump’s America, and an engagingly rambling concert review written by a man on pot cookies. Everything the narrator addresses, from presidential assassination to capitalism to basic human kindness is told in the manner of a stoned person’s long, oblique sentences with all the digressions and deep mental dives down the rabbit hole completely intact. Easily the most immersive reading experience I’ve had in a long time. It’s like one of those photo mosaic posters, where the big picture is comprised of a grid of tinier photos. There’s so much here to soak in and really examine, and it’s clear a musician wrote this book.
I honestly can’t say I’ve ever read anything like this. It’s like wandering into someone’s fever dream. Being forced to stay in the moment with the narrator until he was done with me really led to understanding his obsessions in what I can only describe as transcendent. I’m still honestly trying to wrap my head around how in the holy hell Lee Klein got away with this. The reason he got away with it is because he’s just that damn good, but still. I feel like Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now, just wildly gesticulating and shouting, “I’m a little man. I’m a little man. I should’ve been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas!”
)))
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