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matthewgrant 's review for:
Relapse: A Love Story
by Robert Hunter
In Relapse, Robert Hunter's debut novel about addiction, recovery, and romance, a man with doubts about his wife learns what it means to love her at both her best and her worse.
Relapse tells the love story between writer Rob Wildhide and his recent bride, Annie. After a whirlwind engagement, Rob wonders if he and Annie married too quickly. He isn't sure that she's over a former lover of hers, nor is he sure he's over his ex-girlfriend, either. When Rob and Annie take a drug and alcohol-infused trip to Maine to participate in a lesbian wedding, things start to unravel for them both.
The back of the book claims Hunter "is best known for his unabashed contempt for the conventional - in any medium." That contempt for literary convention is certainly evident here. Regrettably, it doesn't serve the story well at all. Much of the prose is a jarring mess of sentences too chock-full of ideas and adjectives to make much sense. For example, when Rob hijacks a limo to escape to the New Hampshire state line, he's pursued by a state trooper. "We were upon it in seconds as Heaven or some other strange fortuity opened up its gates to reveal what was written, and all I had to write about," he says. The book is full of convoluted writing like this, the story and characters so obscured that it's difficult to understand what's going on for much of it.
Relapse is billed as a love story, but the book is too frenetic and fast-paced to follow very closely. The effect is a blur of emotion and activity without a lot of substance underneath.
Relapse tells the love story between writer Rob Wildhide and his recent bride, Annie. After a whirlwind engagement, Rob wonders if he and Annie married too quickly. He isn't sure that she's over a former lover of hers, nor is he sure he's over his ex-girlfriend, either. When Rob and Annie take a drug and alcohol-infused trip to Maine to participate in a lesbian wedding, things start to unravel for them both.
The back of the book claims Hunter "is best known for his unabashed contempt for the conventional - in any medium." That contempt for literary convention is certainly evident here. Regrettably, it doesn't serve the story well at all. Much of the prose is a jarring mess of sentences too chock-full of ideas and adjectives to make much sense. For example, when Rob hijacks a limo to escape to the New Hampshire state line, he's pursued by a state trooper. "We were upon it in seconds as Heaven or some other strange fortuity opened up its gates to reveal what was written, and all I had to write about," he says. The book is full of convoluted writing like this, the story and characters so obscured that it's difficult to understand what's going on for much of it.
Relapse is billed as a love story, but the book is too frenetic and fast-paced to follow very closely. The effect is a blur of emotion and activity without a lot of substance underneath.