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A review by caughtbetweenpages
The Slummer: Quarters Till Death by Geoffrey Simpson
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.25
My goodness, this was difficult to get through. I read this book with my partner and the laughter we shared at the absurdity of what we were reading bumps up my rating by at least a half star.
Folks, this book is just badly written. On a prose level, the writing is wooden and repetitive, relying on finance-bro sports-adjacent platitudes to take the place of character interiority descriptive action. You know, the elements of sports fiction that make it worth engaging with? It was only in the final race of this book that the author actually detailed what was going on with Ben, the protagonist, on a physical and emotional level and took us through the entire scene with him, which was far too late to make me care about his journey. Usually, error-filled prose jars me from a story, but there was such a reliance on telling over showing (or, as was the case for any moment of potential tension, like a race or a moment of dialogue promising conflict, glossing over and simply telling that the moment was resolved without problem) that I felt there was no story to be jarred from. The errors are actually what I spent most time on, just because some of the dangling modifiers and pronoun confusion were so bad that I needed to take a beat to figure out what actually was supposed to be happening.
There’s not much I can say about the plot of the story, because again, there was no tension to be had. None of Ben’s obsession with running got in the way of his relationships (his gf Maya, described at one point as a “jewel of the slums”, exists only to support Ben’s dreams and later get fridges in a cartoonish mockery of gang violence to fuel Ben’s man-pain (even the memory of her refuses to take up space in the narrative, with Ben deciding that focusing on his running instead of mourning her for longer than a month is what she would’ve wanted for him) , and his brother and father only give him the barest of a hard time about running, but never in the sense of “hey you need to get a job and contribute to paying rent or we’ll all be homeless” as one might expect given the setting they live in), nor does his poverty present any actual roadblock to his running journey (where does he get the money to pay for the food he needs when burning this many calories recreationally, let alone food providing adequate adequate nutrition, or clothes to wear when he’s sweated through them, or the free time to run this much and do leisure activities like catch and release fishing with Maya? I don’t know, and it appears the author doesn’t, either). Ben’s main stumbling blocks come from one element: that he’s not genetically engineered to be a great athlete because his family is poor.
And that poverty is where the book falls apart.
Thematically, The Slummer doesn’t know what it wants to say. It’s clearly born of the author’s love for Gattica (soooooo many scenes are direct pulls from the movie), but the message of “being a perfect genetic specimen for A Task doesn’t beat having grit and drive and desire to do it” gets muddied when the author’s desire to make a statement about systemic issues stemming from class division say “but actually drive doesn’t mean shit when you can’t afford to feed it”. Or they do in this author’s hands, because he refuses to let his protagonist fail in a way that supports the latter theme, since he’s so enamored of the former. If this were a straight Gattica inspired sports fiction story, it may have done better, because Simpson has absolutely no place writing about poverty with any degree of nuance.
This is evidenced most clearly in his paper-thin characterization of every single character. There is no nuance to either the slummers or to the elites. Without exception, the latter are bigots who refuse to engage with the humanity of the slummers, but never in the subtle ways that systemic racism and homophobia often present themselves (where cishet white folks can applaud themselves for not being violent bigots and indeed might consider themselves allies even as they do harm). Instead, we get a Jim Crow attitude without the sensitivity such a setting deserves. As for the slummers, we get many a faceless “thug” doing violence in their own communities, and a Tent City “that should have its own zip code” and smells bad and is dangerous for women to be in. Classy. Real compassionate take, Mr. Simpson.
Ben, the protagonist, never actually engages with his community. We don’t see how they feel about his racing successes except as a faceless mass (Simpson can’t decide if they’re proud to see a Slummer make it or hate him for escaping what they could not. It’s the thematic confusion again, where the author chooses one over the other depending on what point he wants to make. In deft hands it could work! But not here). Except for one little boy who idolizes Ben (like everyone else does) and wants to be a runner just like him. Very saccharine.
Speaking of exclusively being around to blow smoke up Ben’s ass, we reach the side character zone. Frontliners include:
- Every Named Female Character (I wish I were joking. But all of them “believe in him” and “know he con do anything he sets his mind to” and “are his biggest fan”, from his girlfriend Maya to a hot reporter obsessed with his story to the woman who sponsors Ben’s racing and lets him know that it’s not systemic injustice or genetic predilection that wants to keep him out of the world of professional sport, it’s One Mean Man™️)
- his coach, a former runner from the times before genetic engineering of babies… who happens to be a Black alcoholic absent father. And who on page says that knowing Ben is the best thing that ever happened to him and that he could die happy if Ben just follows his dreams. No, he doesn’t reconnect with his own son ever (that might pull focus from Ben!). He also doesn’t actually do any useful coaching on page, but that’s to be expected by this point in the review.
- Ben’s father, the workhorse foil to Ben who at first doesn’t support running b/c he worries Ben will overexert himself, but ultimately knows that Ben is like his mother, too good for the slums and destined for bigger things. (Ben has a rivalry with his brother where bro takes after dad but it’s resolved/hand waved and bro believes in Ben, too)
- Ben’s running hero, Cyrus, whose mom was a slummer (we find this out when Cyrus, unprompted, tells Ben the story of his father hearing his songbird mother sing and whisking her into a better life. This man appears in person on a max of 8 pages in this book). The other elite runners are Mean and Racist, but not Cyrus. He believes in Ben ™️.
(If this is getting repetitive, try reading 300+ pages of it, presented earnestly as though it were a story worth reading.)
Finally, we have Ben, the clearest self-insert I’ve ever seen (and I’ve read ACOTAR). The author took the advice “write what you know” and sprinted ahead with it at full-tilt. Ben is a runner from Cleveland, Ohio, who runs 5Ks competitively and ends up racing for Kent State. And I’ll bet you a dollar you can guess the hometown, alma mater, and race length of the author from that sentence alone. Ben exclusively has flaws of the “job interview” sort—he’s TOO passionate and TOO driven and TOO stubborn about his running—and none of those come up in any way that can hurt him, eg. inter-character conflict or being the explicit cause of an injury that has long term deleterious effects to his goals. I think the author felt too close to him to want to give him any problems where he wasn’t an innocent victim of circumstance, but that just made him boring. The only difference between the two is that Ben is ethnically ambiguous in a way that lets upper middle class white men like the author think they can write about systemic oppression and poverty.
I am struggling to find an audience I would recommend this book for, or an element of the writing that I can applaud in any honest way. I can’t fault the author for his belief system, which (while privileged to the point of the points he’s making about systemic injustice feel like Michael Scott talking to Daryl in The Office) is on the right side of morality. But politics do not a good book make. And unfortunately neither does any of the rest of it.
Folks, this book is just badly written. On a prose level, the writing is wooden and repetitive, relying on finance-bro sports-adjacent platitudes to take the place of character interiority descriptive action. You know, the elements of sports fiction that make it worth engaging with? It was only in the final race of this book that the author actually detailed what was going on with Ben, the protagonist, on a physical and emotional level and took us through the entire scene with him, which was far too late to make me care about his journey. Usually, error-filled prose jars me from a story, but there was such a reliance on telling over showing (or, as was the case for any moment of potential tension, like a race or a moment of dialogue promising conflict, glossing over and simply telling that the moment was resolved without problem) that I felt there was no story to be jarred from. The errors are actually what I spent most time on, just because some of the dangling modifiers and pronoun confusion were so bad that I needed to take a beat to figure out what actually was supposed to be happening.
There’s not much I can say about the plot of the story, because again, there was no tension to be had. None of Ben’s obsession with running got in the way of his relationships (his gf Maya, described at one point as a “jewel of the slums”, exists only to support Ben’s dreams and later
And that poverty is where the book falls apart.
Thematically, The Slummer doesn’t know what it wants to say. It’s clearly born of the author’s love for Gattica (soooooo many scenes are direct pulls from the movie), but the message of “being a perfect genetic specimen for A Task doesn’t beat having grit and drive and desire to do it” gets muddied when the author’s desire to make a statement about systemic issues stemming from class division say “but actually drive doesn’t mean shit when you can’t afford to feed it”. Or they do in this author’s hands, because he refuses to let his protagonist fail in a way that supports the latter theme, since he’s so enamored of the former. If this were a straight Gattica inspired sports fiction story, it may have done better, because Simpson has absolutely no place writing about poverty with any degree of nuance.
This is evidenced most clearly in his paper-thin characterization of every single character. There is no nuance to either the slummers or to the elites. Without exception, the latter are bigots who refuse to engage with the humanity of the slummers, but never in the subtle ways that systemic racism and homophobia often present themselves (where cishet white folks can applaud themselves for not being violent bigots and indeed might consider themselves allies even as they do harm). Instead, we get a Jim Crow attitude without the sensitivity such a setting deserves. As for the slummers, we get many a faceless “thug” doing violence in their own communities, and a Tent City “that should have its own zip code” and smells bad and is dangerous for women to be in. Classy. Real compassionate take, Mr. Simpson.
Ben, the protagonist, never actually engages with his community. We don’t see how they feel about his racing successes except as a faceless mass (Simpson can’t decide if they’re proud to see a Slummer make it or hate him for escaping what they could not. It’s the thematic confusion again, where the author chooses one over the other depending on what point he wants to make. In deft hands it could work! But not here). Except for one little boy who idolizes Ben (like everyone else does) and wants to be a runner just like him. Very saccharine.
Speaking of exclusively being around to blow smoke up Ben’s ass, we reach the side character zone. Frontliners include:
- Every Named Female Character (I wish I were joking. But all of them “believe in him” and “know he con do anything he sets his mind to” and “are his biggest fan”, from his girlfriend Maya to a hot reporter obsessed with his story to the woman who
- his coach, a former runner from the times before genetic engineering of babies… who happens to be a Black alcoholic absent father. And who on page says that knowing Ben is the best thing that ever happened to him and that he could die happy if Ben just follows his dreams. No, he doesn’t reconnect with his own son ever (that might pull focus from Ben!). He also doesn’t actually do any useful coaching on page, but that’s to be expected by this point in the review.
- Ben’s father, the workhorse foil to Ben who at first doesn’t support running b/c he worries Ben will overexert himself, but ultimately knows that Ben is like his mother, too good for the slums and destined for bigger things. (Ben has a rivalry with his brother where bro takes after dad but it’s resolved/hand waved and bro believes in Ben, too)
- Ben’s running hero, Cyrus, whose mom was a slummer (we find this out when Cyrus, unprompted, tells Ben the story of his father hearing his songbird mother sing and whisking her into a better life. This man appears in person on a max of 8 pages in this book). The other elite runners are Mean and Racist, but not Cyrus. He believes in Ben ™️.
(If this is getting repetitive, try reading 300+ pages of it, presented earnestly as though it were a story worth reading.)
Finally, we have Ben, the clearest self-insert I’ve ever seen (and I’ve read ACOTAR). The author took the advice “write what you know” and sprinted ahead with it at full-tilt. Ben is a runner from Cleveland, Ohio, who runs 5Ks competitively and ends up racing for Kent State. And I’ll bet you a dollar you can guess the hometown, alma mater, and race length of the author from that sentence alone. Ben exclusively has flaws of the “job interview” sort—he’s TOO passionate and TOO driven and TOO stubborn about his running—and none of those come up in any way that can hurt him, eg. inter-character conflict or being the explicit cause of an injury that has long term deleterious effects to his goals. I think the author felt too close to him to want to give him any problems where he wasn’t an innocent victim of circumstance, but that just made him boring. The only difference between the two is that Ben is ethnically ambiguous in a way that lets upper middle class white men like the author think they can write about systemic oppression and poverty.
I am struggling to find an audience I would recommend this book for, or an element of the writing that I can applaud in any honest way. I can’t fault the author for his belief system, which (while privileged to the point of the points he’s making about systemic injustice feel like Michael Scott talking to Daryl in The Office) is on the right side of morality. But politics do not a good book make. And unfortunately neither does any of the rest of it.