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2.98 AVERAGE
2.98 AVERAGE
So this is how it feels to take a man’s life. Forced to kill for one’s own survival.
I looked down at the puddle of blood by my feet, locking eyes with my own reflection. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. How’d I get here? I was just a dude who worked at the grocery store.
Now here I was, standing over a man I murdered.
So begins the debut novel of Bobby Hall, a Maryland native who dropped out of high school, escaped the slums, and went on to achieve world-wide success as rap artist Logic. He also answers to Bobby Tarantino, Young Sinatra, and the 1-800 Guy (jkjk).
For transparency's sake, you should know that Logic has been one of my favorite rappers for years, and I've been anticipating the release of Supermarket ever since he first began hinting at a novel in 2017. I wanted so badly for Supermarket to be as brilliant as Under Pressure and as recklessly fun as Bobby Tarantino II. Regardless of my affinity for Logic, however, I want to approach this review as objectively as possible. Too many die-hard fans are determined to adore whatever an artist releases without question or critical thought, and I think that's unfair to the artist. I respect Mr. Hall enough to treat Supermarket with the honesty that any new writer should be given. Leading someone on is no way to show your support. So, here goes.
The back cover describes Supermarket as a "darkly funny psychological thriller," but it's really more of a psychological comedy than anything. The book follows the life of Flynnagin E. Montgomery, aka Flynn, a 20-something-year-old, recently-dumped, aspiring writer with some serious mental health issues. In order to kickstart his writing career and make some steady money, he takes a job at a local supermarket, where he falls in love with a cute coworker named Mia, befriends Tyler Durden 2.0, and rapidly loses his grip on reality.
If reading the opening quote gave you a sense of foreboding, you're not alone. As badly as I wanted to love Supermarket, the distractingly primitive writing made for a conflicting experience straight out of the gate. That opener actually encapsulates many of the problems that pepper the rest of the novel. For one, it's cliche'd as all get out. The second sentence is incomplete. The tone is jarringly informal ("how'd," "dude"). The tenses are inconsistent ("Now here I was"). Not to mention, can you really see your own reflection in a puddle of blood?
Honestly, the book felt like it was written by a crude-mouthed high-schooler. There's far too many commas and sentence fragments for a smooth flow. The prose is riddled with cliches and attempts at being cutesy. The characters use each others' names every other sentence. There are hahaha's, ummm's, nah's, etc., as if the exchanges are text conversations rather than dialogue. The amount of ALL-CAPS, exclamation marks!!, reaaaallyyyy drawn out worrrrrds, and other flamboyancies make the prose downright exhausting on the eyes. One Amazon reviewer writes, "I was really blown away with how well written it is," and I'm sorry, but reviews like these are objectively wrong. A brief but representative example:
“Mia, let’s get out of here, the store’s about to close,” I said.
“Chill, Flynn, we work here, and I need to find the perfect pomegranate,” she said.
“Mia, let’s go, I’m hungry,” I said, pulling her forward with my arm.
“Flynn, Jesus, okay.”
And one more for good measure:
“Do you listen to Tame Impala?” she asked.
“No, never heard of them,”I said, shaking my head.
“You’re kidding me!! You haven’t listened to Currents?!?” she yelled.
“Haha, nah, I haven’t. Is it any good?”
She stared blankly at me.
“Is it any good? ‘Is it ANY GOOD?’ HE SAYS! It’s amazing, Flynn. A true modern classic! I’ll have to grab you a copy from the Vinyl Village.”
“Oh, I love that place!”
Unfortunately, overlooking the prose to the actual meat of the story proves equally grim. The plot starts off with a decent push but rapidly loses momentum, petering off into fragmented episodes interrupted by frequent internal monologues. The twists are so heavily foreshadowed that it feels like the author is ribbing you every chapter and whispering, "Get it? Huh? Do you see it yet? See what I did there?" The "big reveal" was so obvious from the outset that Hall had me convinced I was missing something. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.
There is very little in Supermarket that hasn't been done before. I've seen reviews comparing it to Fight Club, Naked Lunch, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is unsurprising but also unfair, because Hall simply borrows content from them without adding anything new to the mix. I wasn't kidding about Tyler Durden 2.0 — the Frank character literally is Tyler from Fight Club. And the parts of the book that aren't borrowed from other writers are taken straight out of the author's own life. For instance, the description of Flynn's coworker girlfriend, Mia, made my heart ache. Because whether he realizes it or not, Hall is clearly describing his ex-wife, Jess Andrea:
She was an absolute beauty! A twenty-five-year-old, Spanish-speaking, tan-skinned, 5'6" supermarket model with jet-black hair; an amazing body; a warm, welcoming energy; and a radiating smile. She was the only thing in the entire store that felt real. She was a combination of Jessica Alba and Rashida Jones. Random mixture, I know, but damn, was she gorgeous.
The only truly redeeming quality to be found in Supermarket is Hall's depiction of depression and anxiety, and how the two combined can hold a person hostage in their own mind. Obviously the author has fought his own battle with mental health, which makes the passages describing Flynn's struggles the most vivid and powerful. For example, describing a time in Flynn's life when he could barely leave his bed:
I felt hopeless. Not even sad. Just nothing. I couldn’t even cry. The thought of writing was an unimaginable feat. It was a depression so low and flat that I couldn’t even envision suicide as a solution.
Another passage describes the physical experience of an anxiety attack with disconcerting accuracy:
At that moment, everything around me began to flicker, as though the lights were being sucked from the room, then instantaneously brought back. My hearing became muffled, then ceased altogether. A high-frequency pitch shot into my head, like in those old war movies when a soldier experiences shell shock. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion and yet superfast at the same time.
Flynn is stuck in a loop, like a hamster in a wheel. He's trapped in the supermarket. For anyone else who feels trapped and helpless, unable to see beyond their current circumstances, a slave to their own mind, there is an empowering message hidden within Supermarket. Beneath the juvenile prose, flamboyant characters, and uninspired plot lies a message about the power of the mind and the importance of mental health. It is possible to break free. As Hall writes in the acknowledgements:
I have used words and creative freedom to better myself. Whoever may be reading these words, I hope you have the courage to do the same through any form of creative expression. It has been a long road, but I too, finally, have escaped the supermarket.
It's hard to stomp on a book too much when it was written with such whole-hearted motivation and positivity. I admire Hall for the courage and vulnerability it took for him to step outside of his rap niche and dabble in a new medium in order to further spread his message of peace, love, and positivity. It must have been terrifying. That said, artistically, Supermarket is a flop. There's no getting around it. And if you insist that it isn't, maybe you should try taking off those glasses as thick and rosy as the book's cover.
If I could give this book zero stars I would. This is probably the worst book that I have read in awhile. It was so problematic in so many different ways that I really feel the need to stay up and actually write a review about it. If I was 10 years younger and hadn't read Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk I would probably think that this was a good book.
First off, I did not know that Bobby Hall is Logic so I definitely did not buy the book based on the fact that it was written by a celebrity. The description on the back was vaguely interesting and so I thought I would give it a go. After reading the first 10 pages it was already pretty clear that Flynn and Frank were the same person. After the second time "Anne at the pharmacy" gave him his "vitamins" it was also very clear that he was in a mental institution. The similarities to Fight Club were so blatant that it was annoying. "I know his toes were broken, because my toes were broken" is pretty much the same sentence as "I know this because Tyler knows this". Just change out Tyler for Frank and add toes in the mix.
On top of the fact that Frank is an attempt at mirroring Tyler Durdin for some reason it was necessary for Bobby to take a crack at diagnosing his character as well. Flynn has a comorbidity of metal disorders including Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Multiple Personality Disorder, Anxiety, and Depression. Then on top of this ridiculous stack of disorders for a fictional characters he jumbles them up towards the end of the book where we lose the Multiple Personality Disorder and the Bipolar Disorder and now its just Schizophrenia. Honestly, Flynn could have just had Multiple Personality and that would cover all of the bases. Instead Bobby chose to go ahead and misrepresent an array of disorders.
Not only was the content horrible, the writing was also horrendous. It just reads all around very juvenile. I really double checked to make sure that this wasn't a YA novel (absolutely no offense to YA novels). The characters are poorly developed. The things that some of the characters like his mother and psychiatrist do and say was just really absurd for the book. For example, his mother calls him an idiot multiple times while she's visiting him in the institution. His psychiatrist says things like "hey man" and at one point kisses Flynn on the cheek, which is completely inappropriate in a doctor patient setting. It just really makes the characters more unrealistic and unbearable to read.
And of course, all of Flynns problems are his ex-girlfriends fault since she broke up with him which caused him to go work at the Supermarket in the first place *eye roll*.
In all, this book was horrible. It felt like an ad for Moleskin embedded in a poor attempt of a watered down version of Fight Club. The idea wasn't really original, there was no substance to the characters, there was no suspense, and this was definitely not a psychological thriller. Whoever is in Logics circle failed him for telling him to publish this book.
